Sharing Excess, a nonprofit focused on redirecting surplus food to combat hunger and reduce waste, leverages Neon’s database branching to enhance its operations. With a small team, they benefit from Neon’s branching and scale-to-zero features, allowing them to work with production-like, anonymized data without affecting live systems, thus improving testing and collaboration. This setup ensures each development environment mirrors production, minimizing bugs and deployment errors, while the scale-to-zero feature helps reduce costs by scaling down idle branches. The organization transitioned to Neon from Firebase for more robust querying and seamless operations, which has streamlined their logistics and allowed them to maintain high standards without excessive maintenance. This efficient system allows Sharing Excess to focus resources on their mission to improve food distribution across a large network of vendors and community partners.