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How to choose a managed database: Supabase, Neon, Turso, PlanetScale and Cloudflare D1

Compare Supabase, Neon, Turso, PlanetScale and D1 by how they bill

Data reviewed on Oct 17, 2026 · LLM Stats indexes and official prices

The data, today

The context

Choosing a managed database is a decision that is costly to change: your data, billing model and engine stay with you. The five most talked-about providers of 2026 do not charge for the same thing: Neon for compute and storage, Supabase for a plan, PlanetScale for cluster size, and Turso and Cloudflare D1 for rows read and written. That is why the entry price misleads.

The decision comes down to three questions: which engine your application needs, which part of the cost grows with your usage, and what happens when something goes wrong (restore, pauses, caps). This page links the live catalog data, the price guides and the comparators to answer them with figures.

What to decide

  1. 1

    PostgreSQL or SQLite?

    If you need extensions, strict types, built-in authentication or a tooling ecosystem, PostgreSQL (Supabase, Neon, PlanetScale). If your pattern is many small databases or very high reads per row, the SQLite model of Turso and Cloudflare D1 can cost less. Migrating between them requires reviewing types, extensions and concurrency.

  2. 2

    Which free plan works for production?

    None is an SLA. Supabase Free pauses after a week without activity and includes no backups; Neon Free scales to zero after 5 minutes with 6 hours of history; Cloudflare D1 Free cuts queries when you hit its daily caps, and PlanetScale has no free plan. Use them for prototypes.

  3. 3

    How do I estimate the cost?

    Measure rows read and written per month, the size of your data and the compute you need. Turso and D1 bill by rows, Neon by CU-hour and GB-month, Supabase by plan, compute and disk. The price guide calculates three workloads with the rates from the official pages.

  4. 4

    What restore do I need?

    Decide how far back you might need to go. Neon offers 6 hours to 30 days of history depending on the plan; Turso, 1 to 90 days; Cloudflare D1, 7 to 30 days with Time Travel; Supabase keeps 7-day daily backups on Pro and sells point-in-time recovery as an add-on.

  5. 5

    What is billed separately without warning?

    Egress, extra branches, extended backups and compute above what is included. Review each line item before committing to a budget.

Common mistakes

  • Choosing by entry price without estimating rows read and written.
  • Using a free plan as production with customer data.
  • Migrating between PostgreSQL and SQLite without testing types and concurrency.

Tools and comparators

FinOps guideDatabases comparatorCloud options comparator

Guides to go deeper

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No provider pays for its position. Indexes come from LLM Stats; prices from each provider's standard API. How we measure

Reduce AI costsMeasure tokens per request and pay for big models only when neededAI customer supportWork out cost per conversation without dropping below your quality barDocument search and RAGFind the right passage before asking the model for an answerCoding with AIMeasure cost per coding task and review what the agent writesCut cloud costsFind the hidden spend in egress, operations and idle resourcesHandle traffic spikesAbsorb traffic bursts without dropping requests or the databaseShip to productionDeploy from Git with separate environments and clean configurationLaunch an MVPDeploy and store data at minimum cost and without surprisesEvaluate new AI providersCompare Kimi, GLM, Qwen and Muse Spark with the leaders
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