You can host a real Postgres database for free in 2026, permanently, with no credit card. The two options worth defaulting to are Neon (serverless Postgres with branching, scale-to-zero and a compute-hours allowance) and Supabase (Postgres plus auth, storage and APIs, with a 500 MB database on the free plan). Aiven, Render, Xata and CockroachDB fill out the field with free tiers that suit narrower cases. The catch is never whether the tier exists, it is which limit you hit first: storage, compute hours, inactivity pauses or missing backups. This guide walks through each one.
A note before the numbers: free tier limits are the most frequently revised numbers in cloud. Everything below was verified against provider pages this month, but treat specifics as snapshots and check the provider's pricing page before you architect around a number. We track database and hosting perks alongside AI credits in the Perkstack catalog, so you can see what is current without re-reading six pricing pages.
The comparison at a glance
| Provider | Free storage | Compute model | Standout | Biggest catch |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Neon | 0.5 GB per project, up to 10 projects | 100 CU-hours per project per month, scales to zero | Database branching | Small per-project storage |
| Supabase | 500 MB database plus 1 GB file storage | Shared instance, always on while active | Auth, storage and APIs included | Pauses after 1 week of inactivity |
| Aiven | 1 GB | Dedicated single node, 1 CPU, 1 GB RAM | Real dedicated VM, multi-cloud | Storage cut from 5 GB to 1 GB in 2025 |
| Render | 1 GB | Shared | Lives next to your Render services | Expires 30 days after creation |
| Xata | Around 15 GB on the free-to-try tier | Serverless | Most generous storage | Newer platform, model may change |
| CockroachDB Basic | 10 GB plus monthly request units | Usage-based | Distributed SQL at zero dollars | Postgres-compatible, not actual Postgres |
Neon: the default for app databases
Neon is what most people should reach for when they just need Postgres for an app. The free plan is permanent, needs no card, and allows commercial use.
The limits that matter:
- 100 CU-hours of compute per project per month. A CU-hour is one compute unit running for one hour, and the database scales to zero when idle, so a side project that gets bursts of traffic can run comfortably inside this.
- 0.5 GB of storage per project, with up to 10 projects and around 5 GB aggregate. This is the number to watch. Half a gigabyte is plenty for most SaaS apps early on, but log tables and unpruned job queues eat it fast.
- 10 branches per project. Branching is Neon's signature feature: you get a copy-on-write clone of your database for preview environments or migration testing in seconds. Once you have used it in a CI pipeline it is hard to go back.
- Autoscaling up to 2 CU even on the free plan, so a traffic spike does not immediately fall over.
The scale-to-zero behavior is the real economics here. Your database sleeps when nobody is using it, and the first query after a sleep pays a cold-start penalty of well under a second in most regions. For a dashboard, an internal tool or a pre-launch product, that trade is nearly free money.
Supabase: free Postgres plus the whole backend
Supabase gives you a real Postgres database wrapped in auth, row-level security, file storage, realtime subscriptions and auto-generated APIs. Perkstack itself runs on Supabase for Postgres and auth, so this section is written from daily use.
The free plan currently includes:
- A 500 MB database on a shared instance with 500 MB of RAM.
- 1 GB of file storage and 5 GB of egress per month.
- 50,000 monthly active users on auth and 500,000 edge function invocations.
- 2 active projects per organization.
Two catches matter more than any of those numbers. First, free projects pause after one week without API requests. Data is retained, but the project goes offline until you manually restore it, which is fatal for anything that needs to stay up through quiet weeks. A trivial scheduled ping keeps it awake, but that is a workaround, not a policy. Second, there are no automatic backups on the free plan. For a prototype that is fine. For anything holding real user data, that alone justifies the paid tier.
Choose Supabase over Neon when you want the integrated auth and APIs, not because its raw database tier is bigger. It is not. Choose Neon when you only need Postgres and want branching and scale-to-zero.
Aiven: a real dedicated node, smaller than it was
Aiven's free Postgres plan gives you a dedicated single node with 1 CPU and 1 GB of RAM, no card required, free indefinitely. That is a genuinely different shape from Neon and Supabase: it is a small VM running Postgres for you, not a shared or serverless slice.
The caveats: storage was reduced from 5 GB to 1 GB in May 2025, there is no high availability, and idle services get powered off. Aiven makes sense if you want boring, predictable managed Postgres on real hardware, or if you also want its free Kafka and OpenSearch tiers from one console.
The rest of the field
- Render: free Postgres with 1 GB of storage, but the database expires 30 days after creation with a short grace period. It is a trial with a deadline, not a home. Fine for hackathons, wrong for anything persistent.
- Xata: a free-to-try tier with roughly 15 GB of storage and direct Postgres access, by far the most storage on this list. The platform is newer and its pricing model has shifted before, so verify before committing.
- CockroachDB Basic: 10 GB of storage and a monthly allowance of request units at zero dollars. It speaks the Postgres wire protocol but is not Postgres, so extensions like pgvector and some ORM edge cases will not behave identically.
One more angle: if you are on pgvector for RAG or embeddings, the same free tiers double as free vector databases. We compared that use case separately in free vector databases, and the rest of a zero-dollar infrastructure setup is covered in best free-tier cloud hosting.
When to start paying
Free Postgres tiers fail in predictable ways. Pay when any of these become true:
- You store real user data and have no backups. Supabase free has none. This is the least negotiable trigger on the list.
- Uptime matters. Supabase pauses idle projects, Aiven powers off idle nodes, and Neon cold-starts add latency. Paid tiers remove all three behaviors.
- You are within 2x of the storage cap. Migrating a database under pressure at 3 am is how outages happen. Neon and Supabase both start around 20 to 25 dollars a month at the first paid tier, which is cheap insurance.
- You need more than one environment with real data volumes. Free tiers cap projects and branches quickly.
Also remember that free tiers are not the only way to get free Postgres. Startup credit programs from the big clouds can cover a managed Postgres instance for a year or more, which we break down in startup cloud credits. And if you are assembling a whole product on free infrastructure, the full picture, database included, is in the vibe coding stack.
Bottom line
Neon is the best free Postgres for a plain app database in 2026: permanent, no card, commercial use allowed, with branching and scale-to-zero that paid competitors charge for. Supabase is the best free Postgres when you want auth, storage and APIs in the same box, as long as you can live with the inactivity pause and no backups. Aiven suits people who want a real dedicated node, Xata wins on raw free storage, and Render's expiring databases are for demos only. Whichever you pick, know your first limit before you hit it, and budget for the 20-something dollar tier the moment real users show up. To see current database, hosting and AI credit offers in one place, browse the catalog or create an account to track the ones you are using.
Related reading: Best free-tier cloud hosting, Free vector databases, Startup cloud credits