Issue with Free Plan Compute Limits – Refund Request
Dear Neon Team,
I am writing to formally raise a serious concern regarding recent events with my Neon account, which affected my web application serving over 1,500 monthly users.
I operate a non-profit application and have been using Neon’s free plan. The monthly 190-hour compute limit has always sufficed, with usage typically around 150 hours. On August 23, the usual near-limit alert email arrived but without usage numbers, and the dashboard displayed 0 hours. No notice of pricing changes was communicated.
On August 24, I received a limit-reached notification. The dashboard still showed 0 hours, and all database connections were terminated. Only later did I discover a blog post announcing a pricing change. Attempting to migrate my database, I was blocked from exporting data due to the limit, forcing me to subscribe to a paid plan.
Neon’s handling raises serious concerns: lack of communication, missing usage info in alerts, incorrect dashboard metrics, a threshold reached in under 24 hours, and blocked data export effectively coerced payment.
I formally request:
- A full refund of the forced charges.
- Explanation of Neon’s view of these events.
- Clarification if other users were similarly affected.
Given the severe impact on my project and users, I expect a clear, accountable response.
3 Replies
deep-jade•3w ago
Hello!
I'm very sorry about your experience with our platform since the pricing migration. I can completely understand the frustration, especially if your application serving 1000+ users depends on our product.
The UI metering bug is on our radar, and we have the on-call team working on it right now.
You can't access your database when you run out of CU, because there's no compute left to spin it up, which is why you end up being locked out. This has always been the case, but the CU limits are now 50h per project, instead of 190h per account, so users are hitting these limits more often. Accessing the database just to pg_dump or view data from the console is a frequent request, but currently not possible.
For a refund, follow these steps in the documentation.
DMing!
deep-jade•2w ago
So it seems like you guys just backed out from the "enough to run a primary 0.25 CU compute 24/7". I got an email 2 weeks ago with the new pricing masked as 'oh we got more storage for you in the free tier'. I thought - yea, cool. I don't need it but cool. I also got the email that I was approaching my limit, checked the dashboard, found my usage was 0. All right then, ignored. And now database is actually down and I had absolutely no idea why. Now I do and it looks like even with minimal compute we will have to pay more than 20$ just for the compute time alone when it used to be free. Well, not very nice of you.
deep-jade•2w ago
Hey! The bug that was affecting the metering for projects has been fixed, but you're absolutely right, there are many things we could have done for a better roll out on v3 pricing. About the change though, we serve hundreds of thousands of free tier accounts, and before making this pricing change we calculated that based on current usage, only a very small percentage of users would be affected; I'm sorry that you were one of them. What's your project-id, I will increase your limit to unblock you given the bug made it hard to track usage.