Hobby Plan
It seems that a lot of hobbyist are not happy with the new pricing changes making it more costly to maintain small hobby projects that may only have a few users (don't need a lot of compute time) but are now constrained by the new Free Tier or already had a cheap pro plan before to make use of pay as you go. Can't Neon introduce a third "Hobby plan" that has slightly increased allowances compared to the free tier and has pay as you go for like 5$/month it may have restricted or no access to advanced Neon features. For me it would not be worth it to still use Neon for my hobby project after the pricing change I mostly need storage not a lot but more than the 500mb offered in the new Free tier. Paying 20$/month for my project would be too much considering I also have other hosting cost for that project. Or I would have to rework it to store long text as files in a S3 bucket instead only because the storage is cheaper than to use Neon which is kinda sad and complicates things unnecessarily. I don't need any of the extra stuff the new "Launch tier" would provide except for storage.
12 Replies
rare-sapphire•2y ago
Same for me : I cannot use the Free plan because I need to have around 2GB storage and I'm using Neon because of the opportunity to have 7 days of backups (only available in the $19 plan). But for the moment, with only small projects, I cannot pay $19 a month for that. I understand Neon need to get more than $2 a month per user but the pay-per-usage was a good way to make loyal small customers and keep them to sell them bigger plans when they have a bigger project. As far as i'm concerned I will probably leave Neon before april 😦
adverse-sapphire•2y ago
The same problem here. I even agree with simplifying prices, but due to simplification, I noticed that it seems to have become more expensive and with more limitations than the actually pro plan.
metropolitan-bronze•2y ago
It was good to get ride of writing and egress as it's difficult to predict and huge for dump/restore. But pay as you go with cpu/mem/storage is simple and easy to predict and was fine to start at zero.
wise-white•2y ago
For people who don't need a ton of compute, but need more storage, people like @Mike J would really appreciate if you could explain your workloads a bit more. We are really trying to listen to our users so that both Neon and users are happy.
Unfortunately for customers, a ton of the feedback we received was that pay as you go was extremely hard to predict. I definitely think pay as you go is better for hobbyists, whereas enterprise likes a regular bill each month. I know the people who did the pricing revamp put a lot of thought into it.
statutory-emerald•2y ago
Hi folks! I work on our pricing. Thank you for this feedback. What I am hearing is: axing egress/ written data makes sense. However, for the workloads you have which sounds like MVPs/ very low usage the $19/mo is not valuable enough and the free tier is restrictive from the perspective of storage? I would love to learn more about your workloads and where we can consider making improvements - listening to your feedback is incredibly important and the only way we can make our users/customers happy 🥳. My calendar is free if you are open to sharing more: https://calendly.com/atli-neon/30min
extended-salmon•2y ago
Hello, fully aligned with the feedback shared by others above.
What I loved about Neon besides the product was the usage-based-pricing and how it could scale as one goes from hobby project to more scale, or simply from a consumer-like usage standpoint. It was just so much more competitive than all the other players out there and to me felt more transparent.
0 to $19/mo is such a big stepup that I'm sure it's a no-go for many people who'd have otherwise started freemium or small and eventually grew larger overtime.
Why not introduce more usage-based components to the freemium tier? Or provide optionality to pick between UBP and fixed plans?
From my end, storage will likely be the #1 limitating factor and if the price changes goes through (which I think will make Neon lesse competitive) I'll be forced (and sad) to find a cheaper alternative.
flat-fuchsia•2y ago
@Atli Cervantes Hey Atli! Unfortunately new pricing model would be a blocker for testing activities which rely on concurrent multiple projects. 19 USD/month just to be able to create several projects with near to zero resource usage does not appear reasonable. Could you please consider maintaining the pay-as-you-go model? Thanks! PS. I booked a time slot in your calendar to discuss the matter in sync.
rare-sapphire•2y ago
Thanks for listening to your small customers 🙂 in fact i can easily explain my needs : for me the greatest feature with Neon is the 7 days backup. I tried to use only Neon but as I already have a dedicated server with postgresql i feel easier to have my free 24/24 postgres and no need to carefully make small connections to Neon to avoid using too much compute time. But I have decided to use Neon as a backup/second database. I'm sending data from my dedicated server to Neon every day and I know I have 7 days backup available. And I can also use directly Neon in case my main database fails (or for dev with the great branching possibility). That means that i won't use too much compute time (few minutes every day), but i will need some GB of storage and the 7 days of backup. That's not available in the Free plan but $19 is too expensive for me just for that task. I could stop my dedicated database and use only Neon with enough compute time to have 24/24 compute time but again it would make me pay ~$15 more than today. I would instantly buy a $9 plan with the same benefits as the Launch plan but with half of everything (compute time, storage, projects) and the possibility to buy more if needed
statutory-emerald•2y ago
Hi @Grisho thanks for the feedback. We are taking note of everyones feedback as we evaluate iterations or changes. I'm curious, besides pricing what was the main appeal you found in Neon?
extended-salmon•2y ago
I'll chime in on this thread too. I haven't started using Neon, but I was planning on it because it was the only option I could find where I didn't risk significant (by personal project standards) price increases if I slightly exceeded the free tier. I liked the idea that if there was a month where I did a lot of work and a lot of user testing, I could spend a few bucks to support that without locking myself into a $20/mo server that would be mostly unused. Granted, this is very abstract and I don't have a clear answer for what quotas I'm likely to overrun. But storage does seem likely, and without looking too deeply into what constitutes a project, having only one of those also feels restrictive. Before the changes, I would have expected that I could fire up a half dozen unrelated databases for various experiments, and they could be mostly idle for a relatively low cost.
I should say that I'm also a bit wary of free tiers in general. I don't necessarily have a good reason for that, but they tend to feel like they exist at the discretion of the other party more than paid services do. Free trials are cool, but anything I'd like to stick around for a while I'd almost rather pay for; I just want the price to be commensurate with my low usage.
Use case tldr: long-running but infrequently used services. More than one such service, possibly exceeding free tier storage limits when combined.
To answer the question you didn't direct at me: besides the pricing, I'm interested in Neon because I'm very curious to play around with branching.
extended-salmon•2y ago
Found it easy and intuitive to use
like-gold•2y ago
I posted this on discourse, but thought I would post here as well, since this thread has some activity.
I really appreciate the move towards simpler pricing. Removing the charges for written data and data transfer is a great step for predictability. Simplifying pricing across regions is also great. To cover this cost I see that Neon has increased the price of extra usage for compute time and storage which is completely fair, however if I’m not mistaken, the cost for storage seems to have increased ~10x, and the cost for compute by ~30%.
I see the extra storage cost in the scale tier is listed as $15 per 10GiB, does that mean the moment you need an extra 1mb, you are charged the full $15?
I see some people are taking issue with the jump in cost between tiers, and not being able to scale between them, especially if their usage is on the boundary between tiers. For the launch tier, this is made worse by not offering additional storage. Someone who needs 11GiB instead of 10, but is satisfied by the launch tier compute time, all of a sudden needs to pay an extra $50. If you’re not trying to take advantage of these cases, why not allow people to scale between tiers with their needs by allowing additional storage in the launch tier?
It seems that having 2 paid tiers is probably unnecessary and just complicates things. I think you could keep the current pro tier at $3/month, and like with the new simplified pricing only charge for compute, and storage, with adjusted rates compensating for the lack of charging for data, and flat pricing across regions. This would then be more in line with the serverless mantra of only pay for what you use.