Scale to Zero

Neon's Scale to Zero feature suspends the Neon compute that runs your Postgres database after a period of inactivity, which minimizes costs for databases that aren’t always active, such as development or test environment databases — and even production databases that aren't used 24/7.

• When your database is inactive, it automatically scales to zero after 5 minutes. This means you pay only for active time instead of 24/7 compute usage. No manual intervention is required.
• Once you query the database again, it reactivates automatically within a few hundred milliseconds.

The diagram below illustrates the Scale to Zero behavior alongside Neon's Autoscaling feature. The compute usage line highlights an inactive period, followed by a period where the compute is automatically suspended until it's accessed again.

Neon compute scales to zero after an inactive period of 5 minutes. For Neon Free Plan users, this setting is fixed. Paid plan users can disable the scale-to-zero setting to maintain an always-active compute.

You can enable or disable the scale-to-zero setting by editing your compute settings. For detailed instructions, see Configuring scale to zero for Neon computes.