PlanetScale has no free tier. That's the thing to know before you build on it — the minimum is $5/month for a single-node Postgres box, and a production 3-node HA cluster starts at $15 (Postgres) or $39 (Vitess MySQL). It removed its free tier in 2024, and it's still the most expensive of the three to even get started.
| Free tier | Paid entry | |
|---|---|---|
| Neon | generous — free compute + storage, scale-to-zero | Launch, usage-based (~$0.106/CU-hour) |
| Turso | 5 GB storage, 500M row reads | Scaler ~$29/mo |
| PlanetScale | none | $5/mo (single node), $15/mo (HA) |
Neon has the most generous free tier and the smoothest [Vercel](/entry/turborepo-vs-nx-vs-moonrepo-monorepo-build-tooling-and-remote-cache-pricing) integration, with usage-based pricing that scales compute, storage and branching separately. It scales to zero when idle, so a hobby project can genuinely cost nothing. If you want serverless Postgres and you're not sure the project will make money, this is the default.
Turso is built on libSQL (a SQLite fork) and its whole angle is edge latency and database-per-tenant architectures — a separate small database for every user of your app. If that pattern fits what you're building, nothing else here does it as cleanly. Its free tier is real, and Scaler is $29.
PlanetScale is the one you pay for from day one. What justifies that is its operational track record at scale — the Vitess heritage, painless schema changes, connection handling — which matters more the bigger you get and not at all when you're prototyping.
Starting something new and cost-sensitive: Neon. Building multi-tenant with per-user databases or edge reads: Turso. Running a serious production workload where database operations are a real job: PlanetScale, and budget for it from the start.