Databricks Neon [1] has a free tier for their Postgres service. Neon's strength that allows them to offer a free tier lies in their serverless, cloud-native PostgreSQL architecture with a separation of storage and compute resources. This allows Neon to scale compute to zero automatically when the database is idle.
[1] https://neon.com
What allows them to offer a free tier is that they are ok with burning and losing money not because of how they built their service.
Even when a database scales to zero someone still has to pay.
They’re pretty infamous for having constant outages and downtime, wouldn’t recommend for something serious
I’m not saying that can’t or doesn’t happen but I’ve been using them for about 2 years now and never experienced it. To be fair, my traffic patterns could just not overlap with their outages but wanted to add a data point.
I am yet to experience an outage, and I have been using for several months.
>This allows Neon to scale compute to zero
It sure does scale to zero alright...