Free PostgreSQL Hosting: 6 Tiers, 6 Ways They Fail

Free PostgreSQL hosting tops out between 500 MB and 1 GB of storage. At 20 GB, the two cheapest paid options are PlanetScale at $6.25, which allocates one sixteenth of a vCPU, and Selfhost.dev at $8.46 in us-east-1, which allocates 2 vCPU with 512 MB of RAM. Of the free tiers, Aiven is the best pick for most people: 1 GB, a dedicated CPU, and no card. But size is not what decides this. The six real free tiers fail in six different ways, and not one of those failures is a bill.

Key Facts

• Six providers offer a genuinely free Postgres tier, capping between 500 MB and 1 GB of storage.
• Neon and Aiven are permanently free with no card, and neither expires. Railway’s Free plan is not an allocation but a $1 monthly credit that does not accumulate.
• The compute caps differ in kind, not just size: a quarter of a vCPU on Koyeb, a shared core on Supabase, a dedicated one on Aiven, and Neon caps the hours rather than the processor, allowing up to 2 compute units (8 GB of RAM) against 100 compute-hours a month.
• Three providers you will see recommended have no free tier at all: Crunchy Bridge, PlanetScale, and OVHcloud, whose “free PostgreSQL hosting” is one month of credit and requires a card.
• All six fail differently, and none of them fails by charging you. Neon suspends compute until the next month, Render expires at 30 days, Supabase goes read-only at 500 MB, Railway refuses deploys between 8 AM and 8 PM, Koyeb sleeps after five minutes of inactivity, and Aiven powers off when unused.
• At 20 GB, the first size no free tier reaches: PlanetScale $6.25 (1/16 vCPU, 512 MB), Selfhost.dev $8.46 (2 vCPU, 512 MB), Crunchy Bridge $11.00 (2 cores, 512 MB), and Render $11.70 (0.1 CPU, 256 MB). The cheapest sticker allocates the least processor.
• Prices checked September 2026 from each vendor’s own pricing page or calculator, in us-east-1, and every figure below names its configuration.

We build Selfhost.dev, which is the cheapest row in the pricing table further down. Read that table knowing we have a stake in it, and check the figure on our calculator rather than taking it from us. We have no free tier and this post will not pretend otherwise.

What do you actually get on a free Postgres database?

Between 500 MB and 1 GB of storage, and the CPU and RAM vary far more than the storage does. Neon and Aiven are permanently free with no card. Render’s expires in 30 days, and Koyeb’s sleeps in five minutes. The size a vendor publishes tells you almost nothing about the behaviour.

Free Postgres tiers compared: Neon, Supabase, Railway, Render, Aiven, Koyeb

The storage column is database storage in every row. Vendors call it a volume or a disk, but it is the same thing. What differs is the scope: Neon’s 500 MB is per project across 100 projects, whereas Supabase’s is across two.

Three you will see recommended, with no free tier at all

The full rate cards are in our breakdowns of Neon’s pricing and what Supabase’s $25 plan buys.

Which free PostgreSQL hosting is best, and how does each one fail?

Aiven is the best free Postgres tier for most people. It gives 1 GB of storage, 1 GB of RAM, and a dedicated CPU, takes no card, and never expires. Neon is the better pick if you want branching or more than one project.

But storage size is not what separates these tiers. What separates them is what each one does at the ceiling, and no two providers do the same thing.

Six free tiers, six different failures, one per provider, all read from the vendors’ own pages. Not one of them is a bill.

Neon stops until the next billing month

Cross any Free plan monthly limit and Neon suspends compute. Not throttled, not billed. Stopped. The limit counts hours already consumed, so there is nothing left to turn down. The only two exits are waiting for the month to turn over or moving to a paid plan.

Render deletes itself 44 days after you create it

A free Render Postgres expires 30 days after creation, then gets deleted after a 14-day grace period. The clock starts at creation rather than at first use, so nothing you do slows it down. Set one up, leave it alone, and it is gone.

Supabase goes read-only at 500 MB

The database stays reachable, which is the problem. Your application keeps connecting and fails on every write. That is harder to diagnose than an outage because nothing looks down.

Railway refuses deploys for twelve hours a day

Railway’s Free plan rejects deploys between 8 AM and 8 PM local time. The database itself stays up. You just cannot ship to it during the working day.

Koyeb sleeps after five minutes of inactivity

Every request that arrives after an idle gap pays a cold start.

Aiven powers off and waits for a human

Aiven stops free services that sit unused.

You get a notification, and the service stays off until someone turns it back on. That last part is what hurts. A tier that sleeps wakes itself on the next request. This one does not.

A side project goes down exactly when traffic arrives and stays down until you notice. Aiven is direct about the intent. The plan is “designed for learning, prototyping, and small projects, not high-traffic production.”

Six providers, six mechanisms. Every one is an availability event rather than a charge.

The failure mode of a free Postgres tier is downtime, not a surprise bill.

Two cases do not fit that pattern

OVHcloud is not a free tier

It advertises free PostgreSQL hosting, and what it sells is £175 of credit for one month, with a payment method required up front. A trial ends on a fixed date whether or not you used any of it. That is a different promise from a tier that stays at $0.

A paid plan can stop too

This is the part nobody writes about. Supabase Pro bills overages only if the Spend Cap is off. Leave the cap on, which is the safe-looking default, and Pro blocks past the included quota exactly as the free tier does. Paying does not buy you out of the ceiling. It moves it.

What removes the ceiling

What fixes it is being billed differently. A flat hourly instance has no hidden quota to trip, so nothing suspends or expires on someone else’s schedule. The only thing that stops it is your own account balance, which you can see. On Selfhost.dev, that is $8.46 a month for 20 GB, on 2 vCPU with 512 MB of RAM, and the calculator prices your own size in thirty seconds, with no signup and no card.
The number for your own database, in 30 seconds

Can a free Postgres database online handle testing and practice?

Yes, and for many readers that is the right answer. If your database is a few hundred megabytes, holds nothing you cannot regenerate, and only runs while you work on it, the free tiers are not a compromise. Stop reading here.

Neon and Aiven are the two to pick from, since neither expires: Aiven for the dedicated CPU, Neon for branching.

Koyeb and Render suit a narrower case: fine for a demo this week, wrong for anything you want running next month.

The line to draw is not hobby against production. It is whether losing the database costs you an afternoon or a customer. If it is an afternoon, stay free. Everything below is for the other case, and the wider field is in our managed PostgreSQL comparison.

What does cheap Postgres hosting actually cost at 20 GB of storage?

The cheapest PostgreSQL database at 20 GB of storage is PlanetScale’s PS-5 at $6.25 a month, allocating one sixteenth of a vCPU. Selfhost.dev is $8.46 in us-east-1 for 2 vCPU and 512 MB. Crunchy Bridge is $11.00 for the identical 2 cores, Render $11.70 for 0.1 of a CPU, Supabase Pro $26.50, and Aiven cannot sell 20 GB at all.

Why 20 GB. Free tiers stop between 500 MB and 1 GB, and that is the ceiling a working application reaches first: a few months of users, rows, and history, and you are past it. Twenty gigabytes is the first round size clearly beyond that ceiling, and it is small enough that almost every paid vendor sells it, which makes the field comparable on one row.

Neon deserves its own line. Launch charges $0.35 per GB-month, so 20 GB is $7.00 in storage before a second of compute. Always-on at 1 compute unit (1 vCPU, 4 GB RAM) adds 730 hours at $0.106, or $77.38, taking it to $84.38 a month. If your workload genuinely idles, scale-to-zero beats that comfortably.

Matched like for like, the picture is more mixed than the table suggests. At 2 cores, 1 GB of RAM, and 20 GB, Selfhost.dev is $12.60. Two comparisons at that specification:

• 37% cheaper than Crunchy Bridge. Hobby-1 is $20.00, and Crunchy’s Hobby tier carries no pooling, no high availability, and no SLA.
• Only 9.9% cheaper than AWS RDS. db.t4g.micro is $13.98. Selfhost.dev’s compute is 29% less, but its storage is nearly double because a 20 GB boot volume is billed alongside the data.

At the entry price rather than a matched configuration, four vendors undercut Selfhost.dev’s $6.41:

Three of them include more storage than Selfhost.dev’s $6.41 does, so cheaper does not simply mean smaller here. PS-5 leaves out the processor, and Aiven Developer leaves out connections. If 5 GB of volume is all you will ever need, Railway Hobby at $5 is the cheaper answer, and you should take it.

What should you pick once you have outgrown a free tier?

If your database is past a gigabyte and you want a bill that does not move with traffic, Selfhost.dev is $8.46 a month for 20 GB in us-east-1 (2 vCPU, 512 MB RAM), the cheapest option above with more than a fraction of a processor. It is the wrong pick if you need something permanently free with no card, which is Neon or Aiven, though both cap storage far lower, at 500 MB and 1 GB compared with 20 GB.

Price your own size, not the one in this post

If your database is heading past 20 GB, the same arithmetic at production scale is in our AWS RDS and ClickHouse Cloud pricing breakdowns.

What does a managed service for PostgreSQL buy that free does not?

Three things, and none is performance: a database that does not stop without warning, backups you did not configure, and a price you can know before you commit. All three are absent from a free tier by design.

1. A database that does not stop without warning. This is why free tiers end badly, not cheaply.

2. Backups you did not configure. Supabase’s and Render’s free tiers have none, and Aiven’s keeps a single backup with no rollback window. If the data matters, a free tier is not a cheaper managed database. It is a different product.

3. A price you can know before you commit. A free tier’s ceiling is invisible until you hit it. A paid instance has a number you can look up first. Selfhost.dev Managed Databases is managed Postgres on AWS, priced per instance by the hour.

Two honest exceptions. Egress is metered at $0.15 per GB, which Railway at $0.05 and PlanetScale at $0.06 beat. And if you need SOC 2 or a HIPAA BAA, Neon’s Scale, Supabase’s Team, and Aiven provide them where Selfhost.dev does not.

You can open the screens behind those numbers without an account. The interactive demo runs the real product, with no signup. A live instance takes under two minutes after that, on $5 of credit.
See how much your own instance will cost running, no account needed · or start a real one in the console

What is the best managed Postgres once you outgrow free?

Selfhost.dev, for anything that runs continuously: $8.46 a month at 20 GB in us-east-1, on 2 vCPU, and the figure does not move with your traffic. Neon, if your database genuinely idles. The decision turns on one thing, and it is not price. Leaving a free tier is a change of pricing model rather than a price increase, so what matters is whether your workload is the shape a meter rewards.

If your database genuinely idles, staging or an internal tool nobody touches at night, you pay Neon for the hours you use, whereas a flat instance charges for the hours you do not.

If it is always on, the meter stops being a discount. Neon’s Launch plan at 20 GB and 1 compute unit is $84.38, compared with $8.46 for a flat instance at the same storage. The gap is the hours you were always going to consume.

If your traffic is spiky but never zero, that is the worst case for a meter and the best for a flat rate: you pay peak-shaped rates without earning the idle discount.

If you do not know yet, the uncertainty is itself the argument for a fixed number because it is the only one you can plan against. We call that spread bill variance.

Working out what a usage meter will actually bill you is the part nobody wants to own. A real engineer reads your current setup line by line and tells you what it would cost, free whether you move or not.
The free line-by-line cost audit.

The best PostgreSQL hosting for each case

If your project is small enough that a gigabyte of storage and a fraction of a CPU will do, and you want something that costs nothing and never expires, take Aiven’s free tier or Neon’s, and do not pay anyone until something breaks. That is most people reading this.

If your database has passed a gigabyte, holds something you would miss, and has to be running when you are not watching it, the free tiers stop being cheap and become an unpriced risk. At 20 GB, Selfhost.dev is $8.46 a month in us-east-1 on 2 vCPU, and it does not move with your traffic. If your database genuinely idles most of the day, Neon is the better fit.

Every figure in this post is someone else’s database. Yours will behave differently, and two minutes on $5 of credit is a cheaper way to find out than a month of guessing. No card, nothing to cancel.
Your own Postgres, live in two minutes

If you are weighing Neon, we compared it against the field in Neon alternatives and against Selfhost.dev on the comparison page.

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