# Neon Postgres

48 Hacker News commenters recommended Neon Postgres and 10 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Serverless Postgres with instant branching, autoscaling and a free tier that people use for side projects and production apps.

## Why people recommend it

- Instant copy-on-write branching and restores (5 comments): "Neon does support copy on write branching natively and autoscaling compute but you make certain performance tradeoffs." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48125063)) "If you are interested in having a Neon or git-like branching for PostgreSQL experience" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48125093)) "we're addicted to (and totally dependent on) Neon's branching model" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49767933))
- Generous free tier (4 comments): "Neon's free tier is 512MB with connection pooling — more than enough for a side project with real data." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47739384)) "I have a few super tiny apps on Supabase and Neon too that cost me $0" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49026270)) "run well within the free-tier in AWS + Neon DB" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50245621))
- One-click Postgres setup (4 comments): "there are services like supabase and neon that make it dead simple" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46273070)) "Just click a button and you have a Postgres database, for 3 days." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46327581)) "You can provision a free Postgres instance with a single click" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46875308))
- Good enough for production use (3 comments): "I'd probably go a step further and argue that Neon/CockroachDB Serverless is good enough for most people" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46339474)) "Supabase/Neon/etc. will get you to thousands of users no problem" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50143784)) "GCP Cloud Run + Neon for relatively cheap production hosting." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49476728))

## What people warn about

- Reliability and uptime concerns (2 comments): "whose reliability/availability story hasn't been a strong area in general" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48613858)) "For 90% of the time when they're up." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48083770))
- Tight coupling and lock-in (2 comments): "You gotta lock them in early so their orgs never develop the expertise to move off on the off chance they get big." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48086785)) "they ended up becoming a tightly coupled annoying dependency after scale" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49008392))
- Pricing unclear or expensive (2 comments): "there is nothing about pricing on this page" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46875621)) "this is some Heroku-ass pricing" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49135657))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Amazon RDS](https://hackerapproved.com/p/amazon-rds.md): 50 recommend
- [DynamoDB](https://hackerapproved.com/p/amazon-dynamodb.md): 46 recommend
- [Cloudflare D1](https://hackerapproved.com/p/cloudflare-d1.md): 36 recommend
- [PlanetScale](https://hackerapproved.com/p/planetscale.md): 33 recommend
- [Amazon Aurora](https://hackerapproved.com/p/amazon-aurora.md): 23 recommend

## Where to get it

- [Visit the official site](https://neon.com/)

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Neon Postgres", https://hackerapproved.com/p/neon/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).