Neon
Serverless Postgres with branching and scale-to-zero
Neon is profiled here as a Backend tool for engineering teams. Read about features, pricing, and how it compares to related options in the tools directory.
Description
Neon is a serverless Postgres service founded in 2021 by Nikita Shamgunov, Heikki Linnakangas, and Stas Kelvich, and acquired by Databricks in May 2025. Its architecture separates storage from compute, so databases autoscale under load, suspend to zero when idle, and branch instantly through copy-on-write storage. Provisioning finishes in under a second, which is why AI agents and platforms create most new Neon databases programmatically. Databricks reports that four of every five databases on the platform are created programmatically, and the free tier suits agent experiments and side projects alike.
Key Capabilities:
Serverless Postgres with autoscaling and scale-to-zero
Copy-on-write database branching for previews and tests
Point-in-time restore from the storage history
Connection pooling for serverless and edge runtimes
pgvector support for embedding workloads
Management API for programmatic, agent-driven provisioning