Neon is a backend platform for applications and AI agents, officially positioned as "The backend for apps and agents," built on Lakebase Postgres, designed to deliver an instant, branchable, serverless backend experience.
Purpose Neon is used to provide complete backend infrastructure for applications and AI agents. It is not just a database, but integrates database, authentication, no-timeout compute functions, S3-compatible object storage, and AI Gateway into a single platform, enabling developers and agents to quickly create, test, and scale applications.
Main capabilities
- Lakebase Postgres: A serverless Postgres database that scales and branches with applications. It adopts the Lakebase Architecture, decoupling storage and compute to achieve instant operations and scaling.
- Authentication: Fully managed user authentication based on Better Auth, included free with every database.
- Compute: No-timeout function compute running close to the database.
- Storage: S3-compatible object storage that branches with projects.
- AI Gateway: Powered by Databricks, providing unified API access to all frontier and open-source models.
- Instant operations: Infrastructure responds instantly, and agents do not need to wait for servers, tickets, or manual configuration.
- Branch everything: Every idea has its own environment, and agents can work in isolated copies of the entire backend.
- Secure automation: Every change can be isolated, tested, and rolled back, supporting rapid development and rapid recovery.
- Automatic scaling: Neon monitors database load ten times per second and automatically adjusts CPU and memory to precisely match the workload, eliminating capacity planning while balancing cost and performance.
How to use Users can create projects on the Neon platform and build backends using components such as database, storage, functions, and authentication. The free tier provides 100 free projects. The official source does not provide detailed instructions on specific registration or installation steps, and no further operational details are currently available.
Use cases Suitable for various application backends: from early-stage products to growing applications, as well as backend support for AI agents. It can be used for development and testing environments, leveraging scale-to-zero and copy-on-write to reduce non-production environment costs. More than 3M+ developers worldwide already use Neon to build applications, with 20 launched dailyM+ databases.
Limitations and pricing notes Neon offers a powerful free tier: 100 free projects, including database, storage, functions, and authentication. Paid usage is billed by actual usage, starting at $0, with no fixed fees for security and compliance features; AI Gateway is provided at the cost price of frontier models, with no additional fees. The official source does not detail specific pricing tiers or regional restrictions, and none are currently available.
