The Neon alternative
that never cold-starts.

The two reasons we hear most are wake and cache-warm penalties when scale-to-zero is enabled, plus usage-based bills that are harder to forecast. Neon lets paid users disable scale-to-zero; Rivestack takes the opposite approach and is always on by design. For steady, latency-sensitive work, dedicated capacity can be the simpler model.

Rivestack is always on, so there is no suspended compute to wake. Neon paid plans can also disable scale-to-zero, so the meaningful comparison is then dedicated local NVMe and flat pricing versus Neon’s serverless architecture and usage-based pricing.

Those are real strengths, and we do not pretend to match them. Neon is excellent for spiky workloads that benefit from scale-to-zero and for branch-per-PR development flows. Rivestack is the opposite trade: fixed dedicated capacity, always warm, flat price. Pick by workload: steady and latency-sensitive favours dedicated.

It depends on usage. Neon can be cheaper for databases that spend much of the month idle, while Rivestack can be easier to budget for steady workloads because Solo is $29/month flat and always on. Send us a recent Neon invoice and we will compare your actual usage instead of publishing a made-up universal number.

Neon is standard Postgres, so pg_dump / pg_restore handles most databases in minutes; for larger always-on systems we use logical replication and a sub-minute cutover. Migration help is included free, and we will plan it with you and sit in the cutover if you want us to.

Yes, and with no warm-up penalty. pgvector is pre-installed and tuned for HNSW. We measure recall@10 0.90+ at low-single-digit-ms p50 on 250k × 1536 vectors, and ~2,950 QPS at 16 clients on a Growth node (4 vCPU / 8 GB, all reproducible), on local NVMe rather than network-attached storage. Your schema, indexes, and queries move unchanged.

Database and backup traffic is encrypted in transit, backups are stored separately in S3-compatible storage with point-in-time recovery, and multi-node clusters run Patroni-managed automatic failover. Contact us before relying on a specific encryption-at-rest or compliance control. Everything is vanilla PostgreSQL, so you can pg_dump your database and leave without data-format lock-in.

Yes. The free tier gives you a Postgres database with pgvector in about a minute, no credit card. Load a sample of your data, run your real queries against a warm database, and compare p95 before you commit.

Neon was acquired by Databricks in 2025. Databricks is a major US data-cloud platform, which means Neon's roadmap will increasingly be shaped by that ecosystem. For most teams, the product works the same way it did before. But if your requirements include EU data residency, GDPR compliance without relying on a US parent company, or simply preferring an independent vendor whose priorities are not set by a data-cloud platform, that context is worth weighing. Rivestack is an independent EU company: data stays in Germany, DPAs are available on request, and our roadmap is driven by our customers. We are not making a price argument here. Neon made storage pricing more competitive after the acquisition. The argument is independence and residency.