Neon

Neon is a serverless Postgres platform that separates storage and compute so a database can automatically scale up under load and scale down to zero when idle, meaning teams stop paying for a database sitting mostly unused, which is common for staging environments, side projects, and early-stage products with unpredictable traffic. Its standout feature is database branching, which lets developers create an instant, full copy-on-write branch of a production database for testing a migration, running a feature branch's own isolated data, or giving each pull request its own database environment, all without the time and storage cost of a traditional full database clone. Because branches share underlying storage with their parent using copy-on-write, creating a new branch takes seconds rather than the minutes or hours a traditional Postgres snapshot restore would take, which fits naturally into how modern teams already branch code in git. Neon is fully compatible with standard Postgres, meaning existing tools, ORMs, and extensions built for Postgres work without modification, so adopting Neon doesn't require rewriting an application's data layer. Its autoscaling and scale-to-zero compute model is particularly appealing to startups running many environments, like per-developer databases or ephemeral preview deployments, where a traditional always-on database would be needlessly expensive to maintain around the clock.