Neon vs Supabase: the price flips with your duty cycle

Verdict: Neon is cheaper right up until you run the database full-time — then Supabase wins, until you need real HA, where Supabase drops out. The two never trade blows on the same axis, so a flat “which is cheaper” has no answer. The duty cycle decides it.

The flip nobody quotes

Neon bills serverless — compute-time plus storage — and scales to zero when idle. Supabase is a flat plan with a compute add-on: a fixed floor whether you serve one request or a million. That single structural difference is the whole comparison.

A small side project fits inside Neon’s free plan. Supabase also has a free plan, but it caps the database at 500 MB and pauses projects after a week without activity, so a 1 GB project needs the $25 Pro plan. Push a small database to always-on (steady 24/7, modest size) and it inverts: Neon’s metered compute now runs around the clock and overshoots Supabase’s fixed plan by about a quarter. The crossover is duty cycle, not size — Supabase wins the moment you stop scaling to zero.

Bump the workload up but keep it bursty — bigger, but only busy part of the day — and it flips back to Neon: scale-to-zero reclaims the idle hours Supabase still charges for.

The catch at the HA line

At the production-HA workload Supabase shows the lower sticker — and it doesn’t count. Supabase offers point-in-time recovery only as a paid add-on and HIPAA only on its Team plan, so for a workload that requires both it doesn’t clear the bar and is marked disqualified in the dataset. Neon qualifies, but only on its Scale plan, the one that offers a BAA, at roughly double its usual compute rate. Its HA costs nothing extra because it keeps no standby: if a zone fails, the database restarts elsewhere, which Neon says takes one to ten minutes. The lower Supabase number is a price for a database the workload isn’t allowed to use.

So, which one

• Prototyping, side projects, anything that idles: Neon, decisively — a small idle database can run on the free plan.
• A small app that’s genuinely on 24/7: Supabase — the flat plan beats Neon’s metered clock at low size.
• Bursty production (spiky but real): Neon — scale-to-zero pays for the quiet hours.
• Regulated or HA-required production: Neon, if it’s one of these two — Supabase’s add-on PITR, Team-only HIPAA and lack of automatic failover on Pro disqualify it. Across the whole field, though, Cloud SQL and RDS are cheaper here.

One more thing the price can’t show: Supabase ships auth, realtime, and storage in that plan; Neon is Postgres and nothing else. If you’d otherwise buy those separately, Supabase’s “expensive” steady-state number is buying more than a database.