Supabase vs Neon vs Turso: What the Free Tier Actually Includes

Three managed databases advertise a free tier that is generous enough to ship a real product on. They measure that generosity in completely different units — egress, compute hours, rows read — which makes the marketing pages hard to compare directly.

This page puts the three free tiers in one table, in the vendor's own units, with the capture date attached. Then it does the same for what happens the month you cross the line.

What each free tier includes

The unit each vendor chose tells you what it expects

Supabase meters the edge of the system — egress, file storage, monthly active users. That fits a product where the database is one part of a bundle: auth, storage, realtime, edge functions.

Neon meters compute as CU-hours, where one CU is roughly 4 GB of RAM plus the CPUs that go with it. The free plan gives each project 100 CU-hours a month and scales to zero when idle. Neon's own worked example is the honest version of this: a 0.25 CU database running 12 hours a day for 30 days uses about 90 CU-hours, so the free allowance covers a database that is awake half the day.

Turso meters the query, not the server. A free account can read 500 million rows and write 10 million rows a month whatever the CPU does, which rewards read-heavy apps with narrow rows and punishes bulk imports.

What you pay the month you outgrow free

How we measured it

We loaded the three public pricing pages on 2026-10-25, took the numbers printed in the plan tables and the billing FAQ, and discarded anything that only appeared in a marketing headline. Where a vendor states a rule in prose rather than a table — Supabase's one-week pause, Neon's 0.25 CU default on free projects, Turso's per-row overage — we quoted the rule instead of inventing a number for it.

No benchmark was run. These are the vendors' published prices, dated, so that a later change is visible rather than silent.

What changes in practice

The free tier is rarely what makes you upgrade. Supabase's 2-active-project cap is the constraint most teams hit first, and a paused project is a production outage that arrives without an alert. Neon's constraint is compute hours: an always-on database with scale-to-zero disabled has a floor of roughly 182.5 CU-hours a month, which is already past the 100-hour free allowance. Turso's constraint is the write budget — 10 million rows a month is generous for application traffic and small for anything that ingests events.

One more trap sits in the paid math: Supabase's $25 Pro plan includes $10 of compute credit, which covers exactly one Micro instance. A project that needs more than the shared instance starts above the headline price, not at it.

Bottom line

For a prototype that sleeps, Neon's per-project allowance is the most forgiving. For a small app that needs auth and file storage today, Supabase's bundle saves you three integrations before you pay anything. For a read-heavy SQLite workload that never wants to think about CPU, Turso's row budget is the one that does not surprise you.