# Neon (serverless Postgres)

> My go-to Postgres. Scales to zero, branches like git, and talks HTTP so Lambda needs no VPC or proxy.

- Verdict: My default
- Vendor: Neon
- Layer: [Data](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/layers/data.md). Job: Default database
- Last reviewed: 18 October 2026, by Nicolas Dao (Cloudless Labs, Sydney)
- Web page: https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/neon/. The whole stack in one file: https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/brief.md

Neon is the Postgres I reach for first. Branches are my favourite feature: a full copy of the database per preview environment, in seconds. With the HTTP driver, a Lambda talks to it with no VPC, no NAT and no RDS Proxy.

Watch item: Databricks bought Neon in 2025. Prices went down since, and it still runs as its own product.

## Use it when

- New apps on Lambda, Workers or anything else.
- Preview environments: a database branch per pull request.
- Relational data plus JSONB documents: one Postgres replaces a separate NoSQL store at my clients' scale.
- Semantic search with pgvector next to the data.

## Don't use it when

- The client must stay inside AWS for compliance, or wants Bedrock Knowledge Bases on SQL: use Aurora.

## Pricing

Launch plan $0.106 per compute-unit hour, Scale $0.222; storage $0.35/GB-month; no minimum. Available in Sydney.

## Gotchas, with fixes

- **Gotcha:** The pooled endpoint accepts 10,000 clients, but real concurrent transactions are about 90% of max_connections: roughly 94 at 0.25 CU, 377 at 1 CU. Queued clients time out after 120 s.
  **Fix:** Size compute for concurrent transactions, not client count. Use the HTTP driver for one-shot queries.
- **Gotcha:** The HTTP driver has no interactive transactions.
  **Fix:** Use the WebSocket mode of the serverless driver when you need a session.
- **Gotcha:** After 5 minutes idle, compute scales to zero and the next query waits a few hundred milliseconds.
  **Fix:** Fine for most apps. Disable scale-to-zero on production branches that need instant answers.

## Provisioning

Pulumi via a Terraform provider · Community Terraform provider

Terraform provider kislerdm/neon (community; Neon has adopted it as neondatabase/neon, not yet on the registry). Use it from Pulumi with `pulumi package add terraform-provider`. Pin the version.

## Instead, consider

- [Aurora PostgreSQL](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/aws-aurora/index.md): AWS-only clients, compliance, Bedrock Knowledge Bases.

## Worked examples

- [A live auction on Durable Objects](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/guides/live-auction/index.md): How do thousands of bidders share one live auction without races, and what happens when it ends?
- [IoT ingestion into Postgres](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/guides/iot-ingestion/index.md): 5,000 devices send a reading every minute. Where does the money go?
- [pgvector or S3 Vectors?](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/guides/vectors/index.md): Where should my embeddings live?
- [Better Auth or Cognito?](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/guides/sign-in/index.md): Which sign-in should my app use, and what do I actually get for free?

## Where it fits

- [An API for my app](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/use-cases/api.md): pick 2. Postgres over HTTP, no VPC or proxy needed.
- [Something live that many people watch at once](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/use-cases/realtime.md): pick 3. The record. Finished events are reconciled into Postgres.
- [Device and IoT data](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/use-cases/iot.md): pick 3. Postgres wins for ingest-and-report.
- [A database](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/use-cases/database.md): pick 1. Default. Branches, scale to zero, HTTP driver.

## In The Stack Weekly

- [Week 43: Neon Realtime](https://cloudlesslabs.com/weekly/2026-w43/index.md), watching

## Sources

- [Neon pricing](https://neon.com/pricing)

## Related

- [Data](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/layers/data.md): every tool in this layer, with its verdict
- [The whole stack in one file](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/brief.md): every use case and tool, for questions that span many
- [Map of every Markdown file on cloudlesslabs.com, with what each one answers](https://ask.cloudlesslabs.com)