Amazon Aurora vs Neon: A Serverless Postgres Pricing Comparison

Amazon Aurora and Neon are both serverless Postgres services that offer unique pricing models and features, suitable for different use cases. Aurora, integrated within the AWS ecosystem, provides regular updates, global availability, and seamless integration with AWS services like Lambda and S3, with pricing based on Aurora Capacity Units (ACUs) that cannot scale to zero. Neon, a newer entrant, offers true serverless capabilities with the ability to scale to zero, branching features for development environments, and open-source transparency. In various scenarios, Neon's pricing proved to be more cost-effective than Aurora's due to its idle-time savings, although Aurora was less expensive in situations where compute was consistently utilized. Aurora's I/O-Optimized option and Neon's competitive pricing for I/O-intensive applications make both platforms appealing, though Neon's ability to not charge for idle time often results in lower costs.