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8 changes: 4 additions & 4 deletions apps/blog/content/blog/serverless-postgres/index.mdx
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title: "Serverless Postgres compared (2026): Neon, Supabase, Amazon RDS/Aurora and Prisma Postgres"
slug: "serverless-postgres"
date: "2026-07-09"
updatedAt: "2026-10-20"
updatedAt: "2026-10-21"
authors:
- "Martin Janse van Rensburg"
tags:
Expand All @@ -17,7 +17,7 @@ heroImageAlt: "A compute usage curve that suspends after five minutes idle and w

Serverless Postgres is PostgreSQL you never provision or manage: the platform allocates compute on demand and bills you for usage, not for a server size you picked up front. One label, though, covers very different products, and they differ on two things that decide your cost and your latency: **what they bill for**, and **whether compute sleeps when idle**.

We make Prisma Postgres. This guide leads with the comparison and a way to choose, then explains the reasoning. It compares serverless behavior and pricing, plus a by-stage table of free tiers, backups, restore options, read replicas and high availability as each vendor documents them. Extensions, regions and compliance stay out of scope. For healthcare workloads, see [HIPAA compliant Postgres on Prisma Postgres](https://www.prisma.io/postgres/hipaa). The two tables were checked against each provider's own pages and price lists on 2026-10-12, and the rest of the guide, including the provider profiles, in July 2026 unless dated; PlanetScale's billing and idle behaviour were rechecked throughout on 2026-10-12. Vendor claims (including Prisma's) are labeled as such. Neon's Free plan figures were re-checked on 2026-10-05, after Neon raised the storage limit.
We make Prisma Postgres. This guide leads with the comparison and a way to choose, then explains the reasoning. It compares serverless behavior and pricing, plus a by-stage table of free tiers, backups, restore options, read replicas and high availability as each vendor documents them. Extensions, regions and compliance stay out of scope. For healthcare workloads, see [HIPAA compliant Postgres on Prisma Postgres](https://www.prisma.io/postgres/hipaa). The two tables were checked against each provider's own pages and price lists on 2026-10-12, and the rest of the guide, including the provider profiles, in July 2026 unless dated; PlanetScale's billing and idle behaviour were rechecked throughout on 2026-10-12. Prisma's figures come from Prisma's own pricing page and docs, the same kind of source used for every other provider. Neon's Free plan figures were re-checked on 2026-10-05, after Neon raised the storage limit.

## The providers at a glance

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- **User-facing apps that go idle but have latency-sensitive users:** this is where cold starts hurt. Either disable auto-suspend on Neon, or run a small instance on PlanetScale ($5 single node; its docs don't describe scale-to-zero) or paid Supabase ($25; paid projects never pause). Prisma Postgres bills per query instead, and idle time adds nothing to its bill. The [cost comparison](#the-cost-crossover) below shows how to pick between them.
- **Steady, high-throughput production:** dedicated capacity wins on price-per-query at sustained load. PlanetScale (from $5 single node, $50 Metal), or Aurora sized for the load.
- **Many small databases (per-tenant, per-user, per-AI-agent):** account-level metering across a fleet beats per-database pricing. Prisma Postgres meters operations across all databases in a workspace; Neon's per-project free allowance also stretches far.
- **You want more than a database:** for auth, storage, and realtime out of the box, Supabase. For app hosting alongside the database, Prisma pairs Prisma Postgres with [Prisma Compute](https://www.prisma.io/docs/compute) (TypeScript app hosting, generally available since August 2026) and the ORM as one platform.
- **You want more than a database:** for auth, storage, and realtime out of the box, Supabase. For app hosting alongside the database, Prisma pairs Prisma Postgres with [Prisma Compute](https://www.prisma.io/docs/compute) (TypeScript app hosting), S3-compatible [object storage](https://www.prisma.io/docs/compute/object-storage) and the ORM as one platform.

## The two decisions that matter

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Managed Postgres on unikernels in microVMs. (Disclosure: Prisma publishes this guide.)

- **Best for:** apps that want the bill to track query traffic, and fleets of many small databases.
- **Bills for:** operations, defined on the [pricing page](https://www.prisma.io/pricing) as "each time you interact with your database, no matter the compute time. We count the Prisma ORM queries you make, not the SQL statements you run." Check the pricing docs for how non-ORM queries count.
- **Bills for:** operations. The [pricing page](https://www.prisma.io/pricing) counts one operation per create, read, update or delete, whether it is a simple write or a query with several joins. The [Prisma Postgres FAQ](https://www.prisma.io/docs/postgres/faq#what-is-an-operation) adds that query duration does not change the price, and that with Prisma ORM each Prisma Client query is one operation, while with another client each SQL query over the direct connection is one (checked 2026-10-21).
- **Idle behaviour:** Prisma Postgres docs don't describe scale-to-zero or a wake time (checked 2026-10-20).
- **Free / entry:** 200,000 operations, 2 GB, and 50 databases, no card; paid from $10/mo (1M operations, 10 GB, then $0.008 per 1,000) to $129/mo (50M operations). Allowances are account-wide, not per database.
- **Watch out for:** no copy-on-write database copies yet (separate databases are the substitute: on Prisma Compute, every pushed branch gets a preview with its own services and, for databases declared in the Prisma Composer module, its own new database; production data is not copied); less operational track record than Aurora or Supabase; at sustained high query volume the per-operation math can exceed always-on billing (see the [cost comparison](#the-cost-crossover)).
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2 changes: 1 addition & 1 deletion apps/blog/src/components/ServerlessPostgresChooser.tsx
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Expand Up @@ -53,7 +53,7 @@ const tree: DecisionTreeData = {
accent: true,
why: "A different bundle: database, ORM, and TypeScript app hosting designed together, with one schema and one config, and the app deployed next to the database.",
caveat:
"Prisma Compute is in public beta. Auth, storage, and realtime are not part of this bundle; that is Supabase's territory.",
"S3-compatible object storage buckets live in the same project. End-user auth and realtime are not part of this bundle; that is Supabase's territory.",
},
{
id: "shape",
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