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Comment by jenny91 | Hacker News Reader

It's my understanding that Neon had some tech to basically "wake up" the DB when a request came out -- so you could "scale down to zero," if you will. I was hoping to explore this for small personal projects: I by far prefer Postgres and would love an isolated database per project.

Is there an alternative for that? Scale-to-zero postgres, basically?

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For small personal projects, coolify (featured recently here on HN) lets you quickly stand up postgres with SSL, etc. and get a connection string in seconds. You can deploy in the same project or expose pg to the world like neon does.

One click turns it off, or you can just leave it on. A $5 VM will run a lot of small postgres.

I use both neon and coolify, and could live with either, though apples and oranges when it comes to the data branching feature. But a quick pg_dump/restore which could even be scripted solves my problem. Disclaimer: I like devops in addition to just dev.

I'm not afraid of running servers, that was not the point. The point was exactly that I wanted a serverless postgres.

If I can throw together a random project, completely isolated, that costs $0.10 per month, that enables me to do many orders more random projects than something that costs me $5 per month.

AWS Aurora Postgres Serverless v2 has that capability, though it takes multiple seconds.

[Neon employee] p99 for Neon compute start is 500ms

Yikes. No real-time ML with that.

If your project database is suspending for lack of requests I doubt a 500ms wake up delay is an issue.

AWS Aurora is way too expensive and their "serverless" offerings are overly complicated and not worth it IMHO.

I used Serverless v1 and then they doubled the prices for v2 while removing features so I moved to PlanetScale. They were great but as I grew and wanted multiple smaller DBs they didn't really have a good way to do that and I moved to Neon. Now, with this news, I guess I'll be looking for an alternative.

> AWS Aurora Postgres Serverless v2 has that capability

Was just about to react to someone being wrong on the internet and say that this is not true. Instead, TIL that this is, in fact, the case. Since 2024Q4.

Thanks for invalidating my stale cache.

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