Neon alternative
Always on, one price: the other way to run Postgres.
Neon is serverless Postgres: compute that scales to zero when idle and bills by the hour when it runs, with branching and a history you can restore to any point in. Lathe is the opposite shape: a machine that is on all month, priced by its size, with the storage and 20 TB of traffic included. Which is right depends on what your database does at 3 AM.
What changes when you leave serverless.
- No cold starts
- The machine never sleeps, so the first query after a quiet night takes as long as any other. Nothing to wake, nothing to warm.
- No compute hours
- The price is per month for the machine, not per hour of compute. A slow query costs you patience, not money, and a traffic spike does not appear on the invoice.
- Storage and traffic in the price
- NVMe storage sized with the plan and 20 TB of traffic a month, neither metered. Rebuilding an index or bulk-loading data is a job, not a line item.
- Standard Postgres
- PostgreSQL 17, upstream, with pgvector and the usual extensions. Every client and ORM that talks to Neon talks to this.
- What you give up
- Branching: a copy of the database per preview deploy is Neon's best feature and Lathe does not have it. Point-in-time restore: Lathe keeps 7 daily images, not a continuous history. Scale-to-zero: an idle Lathe machine costs the plan price.
- What that is worth
- If your database is idle most of the day, Neon's model can be cheaper. If it is answering requests all day, or if a cold start on the first request is a problem, a machine that is always on is the simpler deal.
Good for
- An app that serves traffic all day and never benefits from scale-to-zero
- A project where the first request after idle must be fast
- A team that wants a bill it can predict from the plan page
- Vectors, analytics or logs that would run up a metered storage line
Questions
How do I move from Neon to Lathe?
pg_dump against your Neon connection string, pg_restore into the Lathe instance, change the connection string in your app. If you use the pooled Neon endpoint, use Lathe's pooled port 6432 the same way.
Does Lathe have branching?
No. If a database copy per preview deploy is central to how you work, that is a real reason to stay on Neon, and this page will not pretend otherwise.
Is there point-in-time restore?
No. Backups are daily images, 7 kept, restored in place; a restore can be undone for 7 days. For a system of record where an hour of writes matters, Neon's history is the better tool.
What does an idle instance cost?
The plan price, from $15 a month. That is the trade: the machine is on for you whether or not anyone is querying it.
Read next: Flat-price managed database, No egress fees, Never paused, never metered, Self-hosted VPS or managed, pgvector on your own machine, Supabase alternative, Moving a Postgres database, Redis beside Postgres, A database for side projects, One machine, every engine. Every number on this page comes from the pricing page's facts.
Always on, one price, from $15 a month.
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