Neon

Neon is a fully managed serverless PostgreSQL platform that introduces branching, compute autoscaling, and scale-to-zero capabilities to Postgres — features that traditional managed Postgres services like Amazon RDS and Heroku Postgres do not offer. Founded in 2021 by the former lead engineer of Postgres at Heroku, Neon is architected with a separation of storage and compute that enables its unique developer-centric capabilities. Neon's database branching works analogously to Git branches: you can create a copy-on-write branch of your production database in seconds for development, testing, staging, or CI/CD — without duplicating the actual data. Branches share the same underlying storage pages as the parent until they diverge, making them near-instant and space-efficient. This eliminates the traditional need for separate dev/staging databases or complex data masking pipelines. Neon's autoscaling feature adjusts compute resources automatically based on load, and its scale-to-zero capability means idle databases consume no compute cost — only storage. This makes Neon particularly economical for development databases, side projects, and multi-tenant SaaS applications with variable per-tenant load.