Databases and backends services compared: free tiers and pricing
27 databases and backends services, each with its free tier and lowest paid price as read from its pricing page.
| Service | Free tier | Lowest paid price | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aiven | Free plan, $0/mo | Developer $5/mo; Startup from $12/mo | 2026-10-23 |
| Amazon RDS | 12 months AWS Free Tier for new accounts | — | 2026-10-23 |
| Appwrite | Free plan (usage limits; projects freeze at the limit) | Pro plan with $10/mo of database compute credit; dedicated databases from $10/mo (1 core, 1 GB) | 2026-10-23 |
| CockroachDB Cloud | 30-day trial with $400 credit | Standard $0.092 per vCPU-hour (about $203/mo for 2 vCPU, 100 GB) | 2026-10-23 |
| Convex | Free & Starter: $0/mo, 1M function calls, 20 GB-hours, 0.5 GB storage included | Pay-as-you-go on Starter: $2.20 per extra 1M calls; Professional $25 per developer/month | 2026-10-23 |
| DigitalOcean | — | $15/mo | 2026-10-23 |
| Firebase | Spark: 1 GiB stored, 50K reads, 20K writes and 20K deletes per day | Blaze: Google Cloud Firestore rates after the free quota | 2026-10-23 |
| Fly.io | — | $38/mo (Basic) | 2026-10-23 |
| Google Cloud SQL | Free trial (Google Cloud credit) | Enterprise edition: $0.0413 per vCPU-hour and $0.007 per GiB-hour of RAM | 2026-10-23 |
| Heroku | — | Essential-0 $5/mo (1 GB) | 2026-10-23 |
| Koyeb | 5 hours free | — | 2026-10-23 |
| MongoDB Atlas | Free cluster, free forever | Flex: $0.011/hour, up to $30/mo; Dedicated from $0.08/hour (about $56.94/mo) | 2026-10-23 |
| Neon | Free: $0, no time limit, no card | Launch: $0.106 per CU-hour, $0.35 per GB-month storage (typical $15/mo) | 2026-10-23 |
| Nile | Free: $0 | Pro $15/mo: first 5 GB and 150M query tokens included, then $1/GB and $0.05 per 1M tokens | 2026-10-23 |
| PlanetScale | — | Single node from $5/mo; HA clusters from $30/mo; Metal (NVMe) from $50/mo | 2026-10-23 |
| PocketBase | Free, open source (single file backend with auth, realtime and file storage) | — | 2026-10-23 |
| Prisma Postgres | Free forever: 200,000 operations and 2 GB storage | Starter $10/mo: 1M operations then $8 per 1M; 10 GB then $2/GB | 2026-10-23 |
| Render | Free instance (256 MB RAM, expires) | $6/mo (0.1 CPU, 256 MB RAM) | 2026-10-23 |
| SingleStore | 1 free workspace, free forever; $500 of credits on trial | Standard from $0.99/hour; Enterprise from $1.49/hour | 2026-10-23 |
| Supabase | Free: 2 active projects, paused after 1 week inactive | Pro $25/mo incl. $10 compute credit (one Micro instance) | 2026-10-23 |
| TiDB Cloud | Free monthly allowance per instance (up to 5): 5 GiB row storage, 5 GiB columnar storage, 50M Request Units | Pay per usage beyond the allowance | 2026-10-23 |
| Tiger Data (TimescaleDB) | 30-day free trial | Performance: compute from $30/mo, storage $0.177/GB-month | 2026-10-23 |
| Turso | Free: $0/mo | Developer $4.99/mo; Scaler $24.92/mo; Pro $416.58/mo (yearly prices) | 2026-10-23 |
| Xata | Free tier | $9/mo instance ($0.012/hour) plus $0.28/GB-month storage | 2026-10-23 |
| Couchbase Capella | — | — | 2026-10-25 |
| Fauna | — | — | 2026-10-23 |
| InstantDB | — | — | 2026-10-23 |

