/technology/vs-hosted-postgres/ · The comparison, with sources
The database, done well — and everything you still bring.
Hosted Postgres is the most usable thing in this comparison: provision a database today and it works. The category has also split. AWS RDS for PostgreSQL is still a managed database and nothing more, while Neon — acquired by Databricks in May 2025 — now sells more than the database: managed auth, functions, S3-compatible object storage and realtime in beta, each cited in its row below. Harness is that application layer, composed at compile time, with the database boundary as the isolation boundary. Both columns below are meant to survive a Postgres engineer reading them.
The same comparison, row by row
Thirteen rows and the same Cratefield column on every page, each competitor cell cited to the competitor’s own documentation.
Shippingin the repo Designedpublic issues, unbuilt Plannednamed, unspecified
| Capability | Hosted Postgres (per its docs) | Cratefield Harness |
|---|---|---|
| Database | Real PostgreSQL — the category’s whole point. Neon: serverless Postgres with storage-compute separation, copy-on-write branching and scale-to-zero; the free plan carries 1 GB of storage per project, 20 GB total and 100 CU-hours per month. RDS: PostgreSQL 11–17, automated backups with point-in-time recovery up to 35 days, Multi-AZ and read replicas. docs docs docs | Cloudflare D1 (SQLite) per backend; 10 GB per database, single-threaded. Or real Postgres through the same port, on the native runtime Shipping |
| Multi-tenant isolation | RDS hands you instances; tenancy — schema-per-tenant, RLS, database-per-tenant — is yours to build and operate. Neon organizes work into projects and branches, one Postgres per project. docs docs | One database per tenant; no shared tables, no RLS. Shipping |
| Where it runs | Managed by the provider, in the provider’s regions — Neon projects, RDS instances. docs docs | Managed by us, in your infrastructure account or ours — two modes Planned |
| Composition | None, by design: you bring the app server, the framework and the ORM — that is the deal. Neon’s own integration path is the serverless driver and ORM adapters such as Prisma and Drizzle. docs docs | Rust crates listed in Cargo.toml, compiled into one binary Shipping |
| Auth | RDS: none — you build it. Neon: Managed Better Auth, up to 60k MAU at no cost, where “authentication branches automatically with your database.” docs docs | Passkeys, Google, Apple, Meta, email and password, magic links, sessions, authorization code + PKCE, ES256 JWTs with JWKS Shipping. Password login needs the paid Workers plan |
| Realtime | RDS: LISTEN/NOTIFY, do-it-yourself. Neon: “Realtime (Beta): Live SQL with full reactivity” — beta, as Neon labels it. docs docs | A Realtime port with an in-process adapter, which is the native runtime’s half Shipping. The Cloudflare Durable Object adapter behind the same port Designed, #103 |
| Object storage | RDS: none. Neon: S3-compatible Object Storage, 5 GB at no cost then $0.23 per GB-month, and “each branch gets its own isolated namespace.” docs docs docs | A Blob port over R2 on Cloudflare, or a directory on a native binary Shipping, #105. No access policies or image transforms |
| Dashboard | The provider’s console manages the database — instances, branches, backups — not the application. docs docs | Admin pages per module, built from its declared surface, behind a token login Shipping. No general data browser; build logs and deploy history wait on the control plane Planned |
| Custom domains | The category does not serve your app; you front the database with your own infrastructure. Neon’s docs state its Functions “do not support hosting websites.” docs | Cloudflare for SaaS: 100 custom hostnames included, then $0.10 per hostname per month, to a limit of 50,000 Planned |
| Egress | Neon: 500 GB per month included per project, then $0.10 per GB; the free plan includes 5 GB. RDS: data transfer billed per AWS pricing. docs docs | Workers and R2 make no charge for data transfer out Shipping |
| Idle projects | Neon Free autosuspends compute after 5 minutes of inactivity and it cannot be disabled; when CU-hours or egress run out, compute stays suspended until you upgrade. Aurora Serverless v2 can auto-pause to 0 ACUs, resuming in about 15 seconds. docs docs | No administrative pause and nothing to restore. Compute scales to zero, so idle costs only storage. The Durable Object behind a D1 database hibernates between requests, which is a cold start, not an outage Shipping |
| License | PostgreSQL itself is open source under the PostgreSQL Licence; the managed control planes around it — RDS, Neon’s — are proprietary services. docs docs | MIT across all crates Shipping |
| Usable today | Yes — the most usable thing in this comparison. Provision a database today and it works. docs | Open-source core, yes. Managed layer, no Shipping |
From neon.com, aws.amazon.com and docs.aws.amazon.com, checked 2026-10-18. Re-check before relying on them.
neon.com/
Fairness
When hosted Postgres is the right answer.
- You already have an app server and a framework, and need the database done well.
- You want raw SQL, the full Postgres extension set, and drivers in every language.
- You want minimal platform lock-in: the Postgres wire protocol is the contract — on RDS, literally the only one.
- At storage and compute scale, the database economics are hard to beat: Neon at $0.106 per CU-hour plus $0.35 per GB-month with no minimum; RDS instance-hours with Reserved discounts.
- Neon’s free tier — 1 GB of storage, 100 CU-hours, branching — is a genuinely generous start.
- If the application layer already exists, a harness would be a second one. Use the database.
Hosted Postgres is the right answer when you only need the database. The harness is the application layer such platforms expect you to bring — composed at compile time, one database per venture. If that is the missing half, request early access.