Our take
Pick CockroachDB if teams who will burn the 30-day / $400 trial on a first Statement Fingerprint, then Standard at $0.092 / vCPU-hr (example $203/mo) when the trial ends — not Mission Critical’s dedicated $0.162 / vCPU-hr unless they need 99.999% and HIPAA. Pick Neon if builders who will stay on Free $0 (100 CU-hours/project, 1 GB, 10 branches), then move to Launch (pay-as-you-go, $0.106/CU-hour, $0.35/GB-month)
Best for
CockroachDB A distributed SQL statement you bill per vCPU
Neon Postgres metered in CU-hours and GB
Free plan
CockroachDB No free plan
Neon $0 · 100 projects. 10 branches/project. 100 CU-hours/project. Autoscaling up to 2 CU. Scale-to-zero after 5 min (cannot disable). 1 GB/project Postgres, 20 GB account. 5 GB egress/project. 6-hour history. 1 snapshot. Auth 60k MAU. 5 GB object storage. Functions: 10 active / 400 waiting Capacity-Hours, 1M invocations. Hitting CU or egress suspends compute until next cycle; storage cap blocks writes
Lowest paid
CockroachDB Standard $0.092/mo
Neon Launch $0.106
Next step up
CockroachDB Mission Critical $0.162/mo
Neon Scale $0.222
Coding agent
CockroachDB
Neon Branching
Runs where
CockroachDB Hosted
Neon
Watch out
CockroachDB Idle still bills
Neon Free suspends when CU-hours or 5 GB egress are gone
Last checked
CockroachDB 2026-10-23 · cockroachlabs.com/pricing
Neon 2026-10-22 · neon.com/pricing
teams who will burn the 30-day / $400 trial on a first Statement Fingerprint, then Standard at $0.092 / vCPU-hr (example $203/mo) when the trial ends — not Mission Critical’s dedicated $0.162 / vCPU-hr unless they need 99.999% and HIPAA.
Read the CockroachDB pagebuilders who will stay on Free $0 (100 CU-hours/project, 1 GB, 10 branches), then move to Launch (pay-as-you-go, $0.106/CU-hour, $0.35/GB-month) when writes or idle-always-on matter.
Read the Neon page
