This page lists the free plans of 10 managed database services that indie developers often use. For each one we show the free plan, the storage cap, compute, request or row caps in the vendor's own units, the number of databases or projects, any pause or inactivity rule, backups, commercial use, whether a card is needed and region options. Every figure comes from the vendor's own pricing or docs pages, which are linked in each row. Vendors measure usage in different units, so the table keeps each vendor's own wording. Figures were last checked on 23 October 2026.
Last checked
All figures are from the vendors' US English pricing and docs pages.
"up to 100 operations per second"; "Free clusters: 10 GB in and 10 GB out per period" (rolling seven-day period); "Free clusters can only have a maximum of 500 connections."
"You can deploy at most one Free cluster per Atlas project."
Yes: "Atlas automatically pauses Free clusters after 30 days of inactivity where there are zero connections to the cluster."
Pages differ: pricing page says "Note that backup services are not available for the Free tier."; docs say "When you enable Free cluster backups, Atlas takes a daily snapshot and retains up to four snapshots."
not stated; the tier is described as "For learning and exploring MongoDB in a cloud environment."
not stated
"You can deploy Free clusters only in a subset of regions" (on AWS, Google Cloud and Azure, per the docs page)
"Free and Flex tiers are not charged for outgoing data."
not stated; the plan is described as "Perfect for prototypes and hobby projects."
No: "No credit card required."; "An account with a payment method cannot have free databases."
Comparison table, Free column: "AWS GCP Vercel"
A separate no-signup database from the start-redis endpoint: "The database is deleted after 3 days unless you claim it into your account from the console link in the response."
not stated for Cloud Firestore and Realtime Database. SQL Connect's Cloud SQL trial: "your instance will be archived" if the project is not upgraded by the end of the trial.
not stated
not stated
No: "No payment method needed"
not stated
SQL Connect (Postgres) is a trial on Spark: "Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL 3 month no-cost trial. Limit 1 per project." "After an additional 90 days, it will be deleted."
Yes: "Free $0 / month"; "Free plans do not have any time limitations."
"1 GB total storage"
"1 dedicated VM 1 CPU per VM 1 GB RAM per VM"; "No integrations or connection pooling"
not stated
Yes: "Power off free services with no initial usage within the first few hours after the service is running." "Power off free services with no continuative activity on the service. A notification is sent before the service is powered off."
Plan table: "Single backup only for disaster recovery" (Free is the first of six plan columns); "Data retention is only limited by storage, with the exception of Free plan."
not stated; free plans are described as "ideal for learning, prototypes, demos, and early evaluation before moving to a paid plan."
No: "You don't need a credit card to create a free service"
"Cannot select a specific cloud or region"; Aiven may "Change the cloud provider, region, or configuration at any time."
Pricing FAQ: services may be shut down if they "are unused for an extended period of time." Free plans are also listed for MySQL, OpenSearch, Kafka and Valkey; this row covers PostgreSQL.
"Rows read 5 million / day"; "Rows written 100,000 / day"
"/ 10 (Free)" databases per account
not stated. Billing: "If you are not running queries against your database, you are not billed for compute."
Time Travel (point-in-time recovery): "7 days (Free)"
not stated
not stated
not stated
"Free limits reset daily at 00:00 UTC." On the limits page the Free values follow footnote markers for the paid figures ("/ 10 (Free)", "/ 5 GB (Free)").
Region: US English pages, USD prices. Figures are the published free-plan terms on each vendor's own pricing and docs pages on 23 Oct 2026.
"not stated" means the vendor's pages that were checked did not state the value. It does not mean "included", "not included", "allowed" or "not allowed".
Pause and inactivity rules stated by the vendor: Supabase "Free projects are paused after 1 week of inactivity."; MongoDB Atlas "pauses Free clusters after 30 days of inactivity where there are zero connections to the cluster."; Aiven may "Power off free services with no continuative activity on the service." Neon's "After 5 minutes when inactive" is compute scale to zero, not a project pause. Turso blocks Free databases at a limit ("your databases are blocked"). For the other vendors the cell reads "not stated".
Three candidates were swapped out because they publish no free plan for new sign-ups on 23 Oct 2026: PlanetScale (lowest listed plan "Starting at $5/month."), Xata ("Xata Cloud starts with a 14-day free trial.") and CockroachDB ("New Cloud organizations get a 30-day free trial with $400 in credit."). Cloudflare D1, Prisma Postgres and Convex were added in their place. No row is trial only.
Caps keep each vendor's own unit and are not converted: rows read and written (Turso, Cloudflare D1), commands (Upstash), operations (Prisma Postgres, MongoDB Atlas per second), CU-hrs (Neon), document reads, writes and deletes (Cloud Firestore), function calls and database I/O (Convex), VM size (Aiven). Per-day and per-month periods also differ.
Commercial use is not stated on any page checked. Where a vendor describes who the free plan is for, the cell quotes that description.
MongoDB Atlas backups: the pricing page and the Free cluster limits page differ, so both are quoted. Upstash shows "Data Size 250 MB" on the Free card and "Max data size 256 MB" in the comparison table; both are quoted.
Firebase is listed for its Spark plan database products. SQL Connect's Postgres instance is a trial ("3 month no-cost trial"), not part of the free plan.
Sources: only each vendor's own pricing and docs pages. No third-party sites.
Region: US English pages and USD prices, standard self-serve free plans.
Figures are quoted as the vendor writes them, including the vendor's own unit (rows, commands, operations, CU-hours, documents, function calls, GB). We did not convert, total or estimate any figure.
Vendors with no free plan for new sign-ups (trial only or paid only) were swapped for vendors that publish one; the swap and the reason are in the Notes.
Where a value was not stated on the vendor's pages, the cell reads "not stated". This does not mean "included", "not included", "allowed" or "not allowed".
