Head-to-head, indicative as of Oct 2026. Prices change — always confirm on the vendor page.
Quick read: pick Neon if your workload is serverless apps needing postgres autoscaling and its included egress fits your traffic shape; pick AWS Lightsail if you need simple sites that still want the aws backbone. For anything latency-sensitive at the edge, cold start row is the tiebreaker.
| Neon | AWS Lightsail | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Serverless Postgres | Simplified VPS |
| Free tier | Generous free tier | 3 months free on first instances |
| Paid pricing (indicative) | Usage-based from ~$0 (scale plans) | Flat from ~$5/mo (1GB) |
| Egress | Included | 1-5TB included by plan |
| Cold start | Instant suspend/resume compute | N/A (always-on) |
| Regions | AWS regions | Major AWS regions |
| Best for | Serverless apps needing Postgres autoscaling | Simple sites that still want the AWS backbone |
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Last reviewed 2026-10-02 · NinjaOps SEO grid · DevOps blog