What changed
On October 15, 2026, Neon made Realtime available in public beta on its Lakebase Postgres backend. Developers can subscribe to the changing result of a read-only deterministic SQL query, including joins, aggregations and window functions, rather than consuming raw table change events and reconstructing UI state. The TypeScript SDK supports sealed queries created on a trusted backend and subscription from clients; React, Drizzle, Kysely, TanStack DB and SSR integrations are described. Realtime follows database branches and is designed to scale to zero.
Why it matters
For builders of collaborative SaaS, dashboards, notifications and agent-status interfaces, the shift is from separately wiring polling, change feeds and sync state to declaring the result the UI needs. Branch awareness may reduce staging/production cross-wiring. The beta is important as an architectural option, not proof of mature scale or security: Neon explicitly says row-level security is not supported yet and has not published production benchmarks.
Live SQL rather than raw change events
Neon says any read-only deterministic SQL query can be subscribed to, including joins, aggregates and subqueries. The subscription maintains the result set when relevant database writes commit. This is more expressive than table-level notifications, though real workload costs and throughput have not been independently established.
How developers connect
The Neon CLI enables Realtime per branch and can subscribe directly from the terminal. Backend code defines and seals queries using a secret, while frontend code subscribes using the SDK or React useLiveQuery. Drizzle and Kysely adapters and TanStack DB integration support existing application structures. Query parameters tied to user identity must be set on the trusted backend.
Branching, scale-to-zero and cost
Subscriptions connect through Neon's ingress layer, and incremental processing is described as running on a replica. The company says live subscriptions need not hold a primary database connection open. Realtime itself is free during beta, but database compute and network egress remain billable; enabling or starting a query can wake a database.
Security and rollout boundaries
The initial public beta supports us-east-1, us-east-2, eu-central-1 and ap-southeast-1. Neon states that row-level security is not yet available, the raw protocol is still changing and the console experience is minimal. Production systems handling per-user data need to assess the sealed-query model, authorisation, tenancy and leak risks before replacing established sync architecture.
What is and is not verified
The official launch and earlier Electric-team engineering preview document the design and rollout. Claims of large-enterprise scalability and cost-efficiency are vendor statements without published benchmark methodology. The relevant decision is whether to trial the SDK in an isolated branch, not assume performance parity with established realtime services.