Supabase, Neon or Turso? Choosing a database for a new app

Supabase, Neon and Turso are the three databases most new projects shortlist. They look similar on a pricing page, but they bill for different things, and that changes which one stays cheap for your app.

Supabase: a whole backend for one price

Supabase gives you Postgres plus authentication, file storage, realtime and edge functions. The Pro plan is $25 a month per organization, and it includes a $10 compute credit that covers one project on the smallest (Micro) size. So one small project costs $25, and each extra project adds its own compute.

Pro includes 8 GB of database disk, 100 GB of file storage, 250 GB of egress and 100,000 monthly active users, with per-unit prices above each.

The free plan includes 500 MB of database, 1 GB of file storage and 50,000 monthly active users, for up to two projects. Free projects pause after a week of inactivity.

Good fit: you want auth and storage without adding more services. Because auth is bundled, you probably do not need Clerk or WorkOS as well.

Neon: serverless Postgres that sleeps

Neon bills for the time your database is actually running, in compute-unit hours, plus storage. The Launch plan has no monthly minimum: $0.106 per compute-unit hour and $0.35 per GB-month of storage. Neon quotes a typical Launch spend of $15 a month.

The free plan gives each project 100 compute-unit hours, 1 GB of storage and 5 GB of transfer a month, and suspends the database after five minutes idle.

Good fit: apps with uneven traffic, and teams who want a database branch per pull request. Neon also includes managed authentication based on Better Auth.

Turso: SQLite with huge read allowances

Turso is hosted SQLite (libSQL), billed on rows read, rows written and storage. The free plan includes 5 GB of storage, 500 million rows read and 10 million rows written a month across up to 100 databases. Developer is $5.99 a month, or $4.99 a month billed yearly, with 9 GB, 2.5 billion reads and 25 million writes.

Good fit: read-heavy apps, many small databases (one per customer, for example), and projects that want to stay free for a long time.

Watch the metric, not the headline price

The cheapest database is the one whose billing unit matches how your app behaves:

• Lots of users but light data: Supabase's bundled auth saves a second bill.
• Spiky traffic or long idle periods: Neon's compute-hours stay low.
• Heavy reads with little writing: Turso's row allowances go a long way.

Try your own numbers in the stack builder. It prices all three at the same scale, side by side.