The Neon alternative
that never cold-starts.

The two reasons we hear most: cold starts from scale-to-zero adding seconds to first queries (painful for RAG and search endpoints that face users) and usage-based bills that are hard to predict month to month. If your workload is steady and latency-sensitive, a dedicated always-on node is the simpler model.

Yes, structurally, not with a workaround. Your database runs on an always-on dedicated VM with local NVMe, so there is no compute to wake and no cache to re-warm. No keep-alive pings, no minimum-compute settings to tune. First query after a quiet night is as fast as any other.

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.

For steady workloads, usually. Neon usage-based pricing is efficient when your database is mostly idle, but compute-hours add up fast once it runs around the clock, and always-on production workloads commonly land at $69+/month. Rivestack Solo is $29/month flat, always on. Send us your recent invoices and we will give you a realistic comparison for your usage.

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.

Your data is encrypted in transit and at rest, backed up daily to separate S3-compatible storage with point-in-time recovery, and HA clusters run Patroni-managed automatic failover. Everything is vanilla PostgreSQL, so you can pg_dump your entire database and leave at any moment. No lock-in is the strongest guarantee we can offer.

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.