Pricing policy question
I'm looking for AWS Aurora alternative managed postgres database, I don't need options like branches, AI integrations, managed auth services and etc. Most important things for my business are high performance, reasonable price for service and built-in monitoring / backup utilities. My first impression of neon was fantastic: convenient UI, reasonable cost, managed backups and managed connection pooler.
Going into details I was very shocked – why price of CU on Scale plan is 2x for same perfomance?
Second impression was why a mandatory option for any business in 2025 year "AWS PrivateLink" is available only on Scale plan (which doubles the price of services) ?
P.S. While I was exploring the capabilities of Neon, I naturally signed up for the Scale plan, which advertises customer support, but to my surprise, I still haven't received a response to my ticket for over 2 days. Is this a true "enterprise" service?
Maybe I'm behind the times, but is it really okay in the 21st century to double prices for basic features (such as PrivateLink, IP whitelist, metrics export) and absence of customer support?
5 Replies
flat-fuchsia•3w ago
Hi Ilya - I can speak to the support question - we're currently seeing a large influx of tickets, and as such, yes we're a little slower than normal to respond, Do you have the ticket number?
frail-apricot•2w ago
Hey Illya, Neon has three self-serve tiers:
- Free plan: hobby & side projects projects, evaluate the platform
- Launch plan: startups, bigger side projects, apps without compliance concerns
- Scale plan: scaling startups, mid-sized companies, apps with compliance & elevated security concerns
Scale plan comes with Support, SOC 2, HIPAA opt-in, and as you mentioned, Private Link. The 2x CU price increase is the charge for the support w/ SLA, compliance certification, and other scale features.
Appreciate the feedback regarding PrivateLink, IP whitelist, & metrics export. There is an argument to be made that those could be Launch features instead. Will share with team!
adverse-sapphireOP•2w ago
Update: I received response to my ticket after 2 days of waiting
@Andre Landgraf I admit that the x2 of computing prices could be due to the costs of complying with international certifications or paying for support staff. However, in the 21st century, in the era of cloud technologies, capabilities like VPC PrivateLink should be standard at all levels of service. If we look at AWS pricing it's obvious that they force everyone to use private networks by charging exorbitant rates for public IPs and public traffic. Against this backdrop, it's appalling to see how private networking is presented as some kind of exclusive enterprise opportunity for a premium fee (x2 of compute price). I'm also surprised by the absence of the eu-west-1 (Ireland) region, the second most popular in AWS after the US (us-west-1). Unfortunately looks like we will continue to use AWS services, waiting the availability of standard features in the Launch plan or a correction of the inflated prices on the Scale plan 😵
adverse-sapphireOP•2w ago
UPD: I still suspect I'm missing something, since Aurora Serverless v2 offers $0.16–$0.22 (depends of region) per CU/hour. So I decided to look for articles on the official Neon blog comparing the advantages of Neon over AWS. To my surprise I discovered that blog articles are no longer accessible, although they are still cached in Google Search. Since Google officially disabled the ability to view cached versions of websites I used Yandex Search Web Cache
Lower compute unit costs. Even beyond the included usage, Neon remains cost-effective. Its compute units (CUs) are priced at one-quarter the cost of Aurora’s capacity units (ACUs) for equivalent vCPU resources, providing more computing power per dollar.Cached blog post claims that one of the main advantages is the lower price on all plans 🥲
frail-apricot•2w ago
Thanks for the feedback! Forwarding to the team - always great to hear what features people want to see in Launch vs. Scale; really appreciate it 🙏
Would you mind sharing why you want to move off Aurora in the first place? (Also DMed you in case that's better).