I tried Neon a few months ago when attempting to switch away from a self hosted db. It was a horrible experience, customer support was unhelpful, it was glitchy, slow, and laggy, and even before the price increase their pricing was way too high.
I've migrated my customer's workloads over to neon's managed postrgres and it's been consistent and reliable for the use case.
I have nightly backups pushed to Cloudflare R2 triggered by a GitHub action for disaster recovery but, to date, I haven't had to touch those.
I ask because my experience with Neon has been completely different to what you just described. Ever since their 'closed beta' days, it has always 'just worked'. Their CLI has been great, none of my automation has ever bombed out without good reason, and I've never seen it cost me more than I expected. Notably, I was also able to self-host it with relative ease, and found that they actually encouraged people to do so. (In contrast, there are a number of similar 'open source' offerings such as Supabase that I've tried self-hosting, and found that while their core codebase is on GH, it is extremely difficult to deploy outside of their own environment. Not intended as a dig at Supabase, they do some really great work and contribute a ton back to the Postgres community - I'm just using them as a relevant example).
As an aside, I've also met people from Neon at various conferences, including co-founder Heikki. They all struck me as genuine Postgres enthusiasts & great fun to geek out with. Neon (like Supabase) have been _really_ pushing the envelope on Postgres for the last couple of years, and have sponsored some significant developments & proposals. In my view they're a 'real OSS company'. While that probably does rose-tint my view of them a little, that's important to me & makes me happier to give them my money. They've certainly done more for Postgres than AWS ever has.
I'm a proud PostgreSQL contributor myself and value the work of my collegues highly. However, it should be said that AWS' RDS PostgreSQL offering in late '13 significantly helped increase PostgreSQL adoption, and the recent contributions by AWS' own PostgreSQL Contributors Team should not be discounted. IIUC, their Aurora PostgreSQL offering also was the inspiration for Neon as a product, so I don't think that your last jab to AWS was justified like that.
(Neon Postgres engineer)
(Neon engineer)
Edit: to be more specific, we will have a new calculations similar to how Snowflake does theirs.
Hope that helps!
Hey, we do want to add numbers back to that page. The issue was that the original numbers were inaccurate.
"The goal of this metric is to represent the health of a system. However, we found this binary “is there an incident or not” approach wasn’t accurate for describing our service. For example, in the past 30 days, 99.9% of projects hosted on Neon had an uptime better than 99.95%; however, the status page displayed 99.89% uptime."
How many times do you expect to slice it? "For 99% of days this year, 99% of our customers have experienced 99% reliability for 99% of their users, we're 99% sure"? (That's just the long way of saying 95%)
Internally we are measuring the number of projects under 5 min in the last 30 days and it's been lower double digits over 700K+ total databases under management.
A TON of effort is going there, twice a week standups, tightening our processes and quality across the board, a standing item in our monthly board meetings. While stability is black and white, what goes into delivering it is a long tail of small and large improvement and a major team effort.
We will also update the status page soon.
Good that they added it now.
(neon empl)
I’m not the parent commenter but just giving you a heads up that your HN profile doesn’t list any socials so I don’t know if people will find how to DM you. Unless you guys have a public Discord or something and it’s implied that that is how people would be able to DM you.
A nice marketing opportunity for Neon/Supabase to get a fix officially released.
We have an SLA in place and haven’t had a single issue so far.
I don't have any proof, but you'll just have to trust me, which could be a tough ask. Neon really tries to be transparent in internal and external communication.
(Neon engineer)