What changed
On October 2, 2026, Neon doubled the database-storage allowance on its Free plan from 0.5GB to 1GB for each project. The plan continues to include up to 100 separate projects, and the new allowance is applied automatically to existing projects. Neon lists 100 CU-hours of compute per project each month, autoscaling up to 2 CU, ten branches per project and a six-hour instant-restore window. It also advertises separate free quotas for managed authentication, object storage and functions. Neon frames the change around builders and coding agents provisioning many small backends rather than a single long-lived application.
Why it matters
The operative change is cost and experimentation capacity for solo developers, small agencies and AI-assisted builders. A 0.5GB cap could force early cleanup, upgrades or migration even when the database was otherwise idle; the 1GB per-project cap doubles headroom without creating a paid bill. With 100 projects available, teams can isolate demos, client prototypes and tests rather than consolidating unrelated data into one database merely to conserve free resources. However, storage is only one quota: compute hours, restore history and other product limits still matter, and 100 projects does not mean unlimited production capacity.
The storage limit doubles automatically
Neon's October 2 announcement says every free project now has 1GB of database storage, up from 0.5GB. The existing 100-project maximum is unchanged and projects already created receive the larger allowance automatically. The limit is per project, not one pooled storage bucket.
Compute, branches and restore still have boundaries
Neon lists 100 CU-hours of compute per project each month, autoscaling up to 2 CU (approximately 8GB RAM), ten branches and a six-hour instant-restore window. Those independent limits remain relevant for continuously busy services and production recovery. A 0.25 CU instance running continuously for a 30-day month would use more than 100 CU-hours, so free is particularly well suited to workloads that idle or scale to zero.
The backend free tier extends beyond the database
The October announcement lists up to 60,000 monthly active users for managed authentication, 5GB of object storage per project and a functions allowance of one million invocations plus active/waiting capacity hours. These are separate service quotas and should be checked before treating a prototype as an indefinitely free production stack.
This follows an earlier 100-project expansion
Neon had already moved to 100 free projects before October's storage increase; its earlier scale-to-zero engineering account explains why many idle databases are economically feasible. The new October change doubles per-project storage rather than introducing the 100-project limit for the first time.
A practical choice for small SaaS experiments
A solo builder or agency can provision separate databases for proofs of concept, demos and isolated client environments, then delete unused experiments. Free quotas, backup history and service-level guarantees may still be insufficient for revenue-critical applications. Teams should measure actual compute and storage usage before relying on the plan for production.