Free Database Hosting in 2026: 10 Managed Free Tiers Compared

Free database hosting in 2026 is still easy to find: all ten managed database services checked here publish a free plan, and none is trial only. The plans differ in what they count and what happens when you stop using them, such as Supabase's "Free projects are paused after 1 week of inactivity." (Supabase pricing), Turso's rule that past any one limit "your databases are blocked" (Turso pricing) and Cloud Firestore's "Document reads 50K reads/day" (Firebase pricing). Every figure here comes from the ZeroRaised database tiers dataset or the vendor pages it cites, all checked on 23 Oct 2026.

Disclosure: ZeroRaised publishes this guide and the database tiers dataset it draws on, and appears in the final section. Every limit, price and quote below comes from that dataset or the vendor pages it cites, and the dataset was built only from each vendor's own pricing and docs pages, and each vendor fact links to the page it came from. Where the dataset says a value is not stated, so does this guide. ZeroRaised has no affiliate deal with any company named here. This guide covers managed free plans only; self-hosting a database is out of scope and comes with its own costs and upkeep.

TL;DR#

Free managed database plans for indie products, from each vendor's own pages, checked 23 Oct 2026:

The unit a plan counts, the inactivity rule and the backup line usually matter more than the storage cap.

What the database tiers dataset found, checked 23 Oct 2026#

On 23 October 2026, ZeroRaised checked the free plans of 10 managed database services that indie developers often use and published the results as the database tiers dataset. It records storage, usage caps in the vendor's own unit, pause rules, backups, commercial use, card terms and regions.

Three other vendors were checked and left out because they publish no free plan for new sign-ups. PlanetScale's lowest listed plan reads "Starting at $5/month." (PlanetScale pricing). Xata says "Xata Cloud starts with a 14-day free trial." (Xata pricing). CockroachDB says "New Cloud organizations get a 30-day free trial with $400 in credit." (CockroachDB pricing). Cloudflare D1, Prisma Postgres and Convex took their places.

Four findings matter most:

• All ten publish a free plan. No vendor in the set is trial only.
• The units do not match. Rows read, rows written, commands, operations, CU-hrs, document reads, function calls and VM size. Some are per day and some per month. Nothing is converted.
• Idle databases are treated very differently. One vendor pauses after a week, one after 30 days without connections, one may power off, one scales compute to zero, and for the other six an inactivity rule is not stated.
• Commercial use is stated by none. Where a vendor describes who the free plan is for, that is a description, not a rule.

The dated event is the check itself: the dataset records each free plan as its vendor published it on 23 October 2026.

Free database hosting compared: all 10 vendors#

The core columns of the dataset, with values as each vendor writes them; regions and backups follow in later sections. "not stated" means the pages checked did not state the value; it does not mean "included", "not included", "allowed" or "not allowed".

Upstash shows two storage figures, on its Free card and in its comparison table (Upstash pricing), so both are kept. Cloudflare's limits page prints the Free figure after the paid one, hence "/ 10 (Free)" (D1 limits).

The columns are not a league table. A storage cap, a row count and a VM size describe different things.

Rows, commands, operations and CU-hrs: why the usage caps do not line up#

The usage caps look as if they sit on one scale. They do not.

Same word, different period. Turso and Cloudflare D1 both count rows. Turso's cap is monthly (Turso pricing); D1's is per day, and Cloudflare says the free limits reset at "00:00 UTC" (D1 pricing). A per-day cap can stop a launch-day spike that a monthly cap would absorb, so neither figure converts into the other.

Same word, different meaning. Prisma Postgres counts "operations" per month (Prisma pricing) and MongoDB Atlas allows "up to 100 operations per second" (MongoDB pricing). One is a monthly allowance and the other a rate limit. Nothing on either page says the two vendors define an operation the same way.

Rows are not queries. A single query can read many rows. Turso's and D1's caps count rows read, not requests made, so an unindexed query that scans a large table can use far more of the allowance than the request count suggests. Cloud Firestore counts documents returned in the same spirit.

Compute differs again: Neon lists "Sizes up to 2 CU (8 GB RAM)" (Neon pricing) and Supabase "Shared CPU • 500 MB RAM" (Supabase pricing). To compare two vendors honestly, count what your own app does in a normal week (rows scanned, commands sent, documents read), then read each vendor's rule against that number.

Pause and inactivity rules on free database plans#

A demo nobody opens for a while can be paused or switched off when the one visitor who matters arrives.

Supabase. One week is short: a waitlist or a tool you demo once a month can go seven days without a request. The comparison table repeats it as "Pausing After 1 week of inactivity" (Supabase pricing).

MongoDB Atlas. The Atlas rule is longer and narrower: 30 days, and only with zero connections (Atlas docs). The page does not define activity any further.

Aiven. Aiven lists two cases on its service pricing page: services with "no initial usage within the first few hours after the service is running", and services with "no continuative activity". It says a notification comes first (Aiven docs). Its pricing FAQ adds that Aiven may shut down services that "are unused for an extended period of time" (Aiven pricing). No number of days is given on either page.

Neon. "Neon databases scale to zero by default." (Neon pricing). That is about compute, not data: the project stays. The pages checked do not say how long the first query after a quiet spell takes.

Two extras that are not the free plan. Upstash's no-signup database "is deleted after 3 days unless you claim it" (Upstash pricing). Firebase's SQL Connect Postgres is a "3 month no-cost trial"; an instance not upgraded is archived, and "After an additional 90 days, it will be deleted." (Firebase pricing).

Where the rule is not stated, assume nothing either way.

Backups and restore on free database tiers#

A free database with no backup is fine for a prototype and risky once customers pay.

MongoDB Atlas has two answers. The pricing page says "Note that backup services are not available for the Free tier." (MongoDB pricing). The Free cluster limits page says that when you enable Free cluster backups, Atlas takes a snapshot each day and "retains up to four snapshots" (Atlas docs). The dataset quotes both and does not pick one.

Restore windows are not backups you can download. Neon's "Up to 6 hours or 1 GB of data changes" (Neon pricing), Turso's "1 day" (Turso pricing) and D1's "7 days (Free)" (D1 limits) are windows for rolling back inside the vendor's own system. They help after a bad migration, not if the account itself goes.

Deleted databases. Turso says "Only databases that were deleted while you were on a paid plan are guaranteed to be restorable." (Turso pricing).

Retention after the plan. Aiven notes "Data retention is only limited by storage, with the exception of Free plan." (Aiven pricing), without saying what the Free exception is.

A scheduled export to storage you control is the one backup no plan change can remove. For several free tiers here, it is the only backup on offer.

Free database hosting beyond Postgres: SQLite, document, key value and reactive#

Four of the ten free plans are Postgres: Supabase, Neon, Aiven and Prisma Postgres. Their caps sit in the tables above, and the free Postgres database guide covers choosing between Postgres hosts. The other six are different kinds of database, and the free plan reads differently for each.

Turso (SQLite-based). Turso's free plan is "Free $0/month" with "Databases 100", "Storage 5GB" and "Monthly Syncs 3GB" beside the row caps (Turso pricing). The hard edge is the limit rule: "Once you exceed the limit on any single metric (storage, rows read, rows written, or syncs), your databases are blocked, even if the other metrics are still well under quota." On Free, the page says "You will need to upgrade to a paid plan."

Cloudflare D1 (SQLite-based). D1 sits inside "Workers Free" with "5 GB (total)" of storage and "500 MB (Free)" per database (D1 limits). Its row caps are per day, and Cloudflare's billing note reads "If you are not running queries against your database, you are not billed for compute." (D1 pricing).

MongoDB Atlas (document). M0 is "Free forever" with "512MB of storage" and "32MB of sort memory" (MongoDB pricing). The docs add transfer caps, "Free clusters: 10 GB in and 10 GB out per period" over a rolling seven-day period, and "Free clusters can only have a maximum of 500 connections." (Atlas docs).

Firebase (Cloud Firestore and Realtime Database). The Spark plan is "No-cost" with "No payment method needed" (Firebase pricing). Cloud Firestore gets "Stored data 1 GiB total" and per-day document caps; the Realtime Database gets "GB stored 1 GB", "Simultaneous connections 100" and "GB downloaded 10 GB/month". One product is written in GiB and the other in GB.

Upstash (Redis, key value). "Free tier includes 250MB data size and 500K commands per month." (Upstash pricing). Two account rules matter more: "A free account can have 1 database." and "An account with a payment method cannot have free databases." (Upstash billing docs). Add a card and the free database goes with it.

Convex (reactive backend). Convex bundles the database with server functions, so its free caps count both: "Function calls Free: 1,000,000/month total", "Database I/O Free: 1 GB/month total" and "Storage Free: 0.5 GB total" (Convex limits). The pricing page lists one card for "Free & Starter", described "For personal projects and prototypes" (Convex pricing). The difference is in the docs: "Free has hard resource caps, while Starter can exceed its included resource amounts with usage-based pricing."

The small print on free database hosting#

Four other lines often matter more than the storage cap.

Commercial use. No vendor states it on the pages checked. Some describe who the plan is for, which is not a rule:

If you charge for your product, read the terms page of the database you pick. The free hosting for commercial use guide shows how that wording can differ between a pricing page and a terms page.

Card on file. Neon, Turso, Upstash, Firebase, Aiven and Prisma Postgres say no card is needed; for Supabase, MongoDB Atlas, Cloudflare D1 and Convex it is not stated. Upstash adds the twist above: a payment method on the account removes free databases (Upstash billing docs).

Regions. Most pages checked do not state free-plan regions. Aiven says the free plan "Cannot select a specific cloud or region" (Aiven pricing) and that Aiven may "Change the cloud provider, region, or configuration at any time." (Aiven docs). MongoDB says "You can deploy Free clusters only in a subset of regions" (Atlas docs). Upstash's comparison table lists "AWS GCP Vercel" for Free (Upstash pricing). Convex lists "Selectable data region" on all plans, and says "Pricing in other regions is 1.3x." (Convex limits).

Connections. MongoDB allows 500 connections on Free clusters (Atlas docs), Prisma Postgres lists "Connection limit (pooled) Free 10" (Prisma pricing), the Firebase Realtime Database lists 100 simultaneous connections, and Aiven's free plan has "No integrations or connection pooling" (Aiven pricing).

A launch is when this bites: more rows read against a per-day cap and more connections at once. The traffic spikes guide covers what else to check before launch day.

How to choose free database hosting for a small product#

The dataset does not rank vendors. These questions sort the options for a particular product.

What shape is your data? Relational data with joins points to Postgres or a SQLite-based database. Loosely structured records point to a document store. Sessions, rate limits and queues often suit Redis. If you want the database and server functions in one place, Convex's free plan counts both.

Will the project sit idle? If a demo may go a week without traffic, Supabase's pause rule applies to it (Supabase pricing). If it may go a month without a connection, MongoDB's applies (Atlas docs).

Which unit will you burn first? Estimate rows scanned, commands, documents read or function calls for one busy day and one normal month. Then check whether the vendor's cap is per day or per month. A per-day cap is the one a launch can break.

What happens at the limit? Know this before you need it.

Paid prices are not recorded in the dataset, so this guide does not quote them. Before you rely on a free plan, find the next paid plan as the vendor shows it.

How will you get your data out? Check that you can export a full dump on the free plan, and run that export on a schedule.

Where do the other parts live? If you sign users in through your database vendor, the free auth providers guide compares the auth side, and the launch checklist for bootstrapped makers puts the database in order with everything else to set up before launch.

Where ZeroRaised fits#

A database is where a launch either keeps its first sign-ups or loses them. ZeroRaised keeps the database tiers dataset for that reason: 10 free plans, every figure linked to the vendor's own page, with a check date and a CSV download. The ZeroRaised data hub lists it with the other datasets, including the free hosting and database tiers. If a vendor's page has changed since 23 Oct 2026, the vendor's page wins.

ZeroRaised is a free launch site for bootstrapped makers whose products have no institutional VC or accelerator equity. Once your database is set up, backed up and will not fall asleep on launch day, you can submit your product for review. The maker perks page lists separate offers for eligible makers, some of which cut running costs.

So, free database hosting in one line: all ten vendors checked publish a free plan, but they count in different units, treat idle databases differently and back up very different amounts, so match the small print to your product before the headline number.