Databases
Free Postgres in 2026: who still gives it away
Free hosted databases are still easy to find, but several well-known ones have closed. This guide covers what is left, based on each provider's pricing page as of 1 Nov 2026, and the limits worth checking before storage size.
By AltFTool editors · 01 Nov 2026 · 7 min read
The free plans that ended
Older tutorials still point to services that no longer have a free plan. If you follow one, you will hit a paywall or a dead link.
- Heroku: free dynos and free Postgres ended on 28 November 2022.
- PlanetScale Hobby (MySQL): ended on 8 April 2024. PlanetScale has no free plan now.
- ElephantSQL: stopped sales in May 2024 and shut down on 27 January 2025.
Free Postgres options now
These figures come from each provider's pricing page. They change, so check before you commit.
- Neon: 1 GB storage per project (20 GB per account), up to 100 projects, 100 compute-hours per project per month. Compute scales to zero after 5 minutes idle.
- Supabase: 2 free projects, each with a 500 MB database and 1 GB file storage. Projects pause after 1 week of inactivity.
- Nhost: one active project with a 1 GB database. It pauses after 1 week of inactivity.
- Aiven: one free PostgreSQL service with 1 GB RAM and 1 GB storage, single node, region not selectable.
- Prisma Postgres: up to 50 databases, 2 GB storage and 200,000 operations a month, with no card.
Idle rules matter more than storage
Most side projects never fill 500 MB. What catches people out is the idle rule.
A database that scales to zero adds a delay to the first query after a quiet spell. A project that pauses after a week may need you to log in and restore it. For a demo you open once a month, that can mean a broken first page.
If you do not need Postgres
Other free databases may fit better, depending on your app.
- MongoDB Atlas M0: 512 MB, capped at 100 operations per second, paused after 30 days with no connections.
- Turso (SQLite): up to 100 databases, 5 GB total, 500 million row reads and 10 million row writes a month.
- Cloudflare D1 (SQLite): 5 GB total, 5 million row reads and 100,000 row writes per day.
- Upstash Redis: 250 MB and 500,000 commands a month, good for caching and rate limits.
Back up your own data
Free plans keep short restore windows, if any. Neon's free restore window is 6 hours, and Turso's free plan has 1 day of point-in-time restore.
Schedule a regular pg_dump (or your database's export tool) to storage you control. It is the cheapest protection against a policy change or a closed service.
