7 Databases With Generous Free Tiers for Side Projects (2026)

Turso offers the most generous free tier of any managed database in 2026: 5 GB of storage, 500 million rows read per month, 10 million rows written per month, and up to 100 databases — all without a credit card. For context, Supabase gives you 500 MB and Neon gives you 0.5 GB per project. Turso gives you ten times that.

The technology underneath is libSQL, an open-source fork of SQLite maintained by Turso's team. This matters for side projects because SQLite's operational simplicity (no connection pooling, no vacuum maintenance, no pg_dump rituals) means less DevOps overhead when you just want to ship and forget. Turso adds what SQLite lacks: managed hosting, edge replication, and multi-tenancy. Your database runs at the edge closest to your users, with read replicas automatically distributed across Turso's global network. For a side project deployed on Vercel, Cloudflare Workers, or Fly.io, this translates to sub-10ms database reads without any configuration.

The 100-database limit on the free tier enables a database-per-user or database-per-tenant architecture that would be absurdly expensive with Postgres-based providers. Building a SaaS side project? Give each customer their own database for free. The embedded replicas feature lets you bundle a local SQLite replica inside your app for zero-latency reads — the database syncs asynchronously with the cloud. For side projects that sit idle for weeks, there's no inactivity pausing or cold start penalty.

Supabase isn't just a database — it's the entire backend your side project needs, packaged behind a single free tier. You get a managed Postgres database (500 MB), authentication with 50K monthly active users, 1 GB file storage, real-time subscriptions, and edge functions — all the infrastructure that would otherwise require stitching together five separate services. For side projects where you want to go from idea to deployed app in a weekend, Supabase's "one platform" approach eliminates the integration tax.

The Postgres foundation means you're not learning a proprietary query language or locked into a vendor-specific data model. Use any Postgres client, any ORM (Prisma, Drizzle, Knex), and any migration tool. Supabase auto-generates REST and GraphQL APIs from your schema via PostgREST, so you can start querying data immediately without writing a single API route. The row-level security system lets you define access policies directly in SQL — no middleware layer needed.

The honest caveat: Supabase pauses free-tier projects after 7 days of inactivity. This is the biggest gotcha for side projects that sit dormant between bursts of development or usage. When paused, your app returns connection errors until you manually unpause in the dashboard. It's not data loss — your data is preserved — but it means your side project isn't truly "always on" unless you set up a cron ping to keep it awake. The jump to the Pro plan ($25/month) removes pausing but is steep for a project that generates zero revenue.

Neon is the best option for developers who want real Postgres — not a Postgres-compatible alternative, not a platform that happens to use Postgres underneath, but a managed Postgres service with modern developer experience features built on top. The free tier gives you 0.5 GB per project across up to 100 projects, 100 compute-hours per month, and 10 database branches — enough to run a meaningful side project and use branching for development workflows.

The killer feature for side projects is database branching. Create a branch of your production database to test schema migrations, experiment with data transformations, or give each pull request its own database copy — then merge or discard. This is the workflow that PlanetScale pioneered and developers loved, now available on free-tier Postgres. For side projects where you're iterating rapidly and don't want to trash your production data during experiments, branching eliminates the "I'll just test in prod" temptation.

Neon's serverless architecture scales compute to zero after 5 minutes of inactivity, which means you're not wasting compute-hours when nobody's using your app. The tradeoff is a cold start of 500ms-2s on the first query after the database wakes up. For side projects serving real users, this means the first page load after a quiet period feels sluggish. For APIs and background jobs, it's rarely noticeable. The Neon serverless driver works with edge runtimes (Vercel, Cloudflare Workers) via HTTP, so you don't need a persistent connection pool.

PocketBase takes a fundamentally different approach: there is no free tier because there is no vendor. It's a single Go binary that you download and run. Embedded SQLite database, authentication (email + OAuth2), file storage, real-time subscriptions, REST API, and a polished admin dashboard — all in one 15MB executable. No external services, no API keys, no monthly invoices, no free tier to lose.

For side projects, PocketBase's economics are unbeatable. Deploy it on a $5/month VPS (Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Fly.io) and you get more resources than any managed free tier — typically 20-50 GB of disk, 1-2 GB of RAM, and no artificial limits on connections, reads, or writes. The total cost of running PocketBase for a year ($60) is less than one month of most databases' entry-level paid plans. And because it's MIT-licensed open source with 40,000+ GitHub stars, the project's survival doesn't depend on a company's funding runway.

The tradeoff is operational responsibility. You handle backups (use Litestream for continuous SQLite replication to S3), updates (download the new binary and restart), and uptime (your server goes down, your app goes down). There's no auto-scaling, no edge replication, and no managed monitoring. For developers comfortable with basic server administration, this is trivial. For those who want zero ops, the managed databases above are better fits. PocketBase is best for the developer who thinks "I'd rather own my infrastructure than rent someone's free tier."

Firebase earns its spot for one specific use case: mobile and offline-first applications. Firestore's client SDKs handle offline data caching, conflict resolution, and background sync automatically — features that would take weeks to build on top of a raw Postgres database. If your side project is a mobile app or a PWA that needs to work without internet, Firebase remains the most practical choice.

The free Spark plan includes 1 GB of Firestore storage, 50K reads/day, 20K writes/day, 20K deletes/day, plus Firebase Authentication for 50K monthly active users, 5 GB of Cloud Storage, and Firebase Hosting. The daily operation limits reset at midnight Pacific time. For a side project with modest daily usage, these limits are comfortable. The risk is a usage spike — one viral day that exceeds 50K reads will stop your app until midnight resets the counter.

The honest concern with Firebase is lock-in. Firestore's document model, query language, and security rules are proprietary. Migrating from Firestore to Postgres or MongoDB requires rewriting your data access layer, not just changing a connection string. For side projects that might evolve into real products, this lock-in cost should factor into the decision. Google has never removed Firebase's free tier (it's been free since 2014), so the free tier sustainability concern is lower than newer providers — but the migration cost if you choose to leave is higher.

MongoDB Atlas offers something rare in the free database tier market: a cluster that never pauses, never sleeps, and never requires a credit card. The M0 free tier has been available since 2016 and MongoDB has consistently maintained it through multiple pricing changes — making it one of the most stable free tiers in the industry. For side projects that need to stay online even when you forget about them for months, this reliability matters.

The free M0 cluster gives you 512 MB of storage, 100 operations per second, and 500 connections on a shared instance. The storage is tight for anything data-intensive, but for a typical CRUD side project — user accounts, settings, posts, comments — 512 MB holds tens of thousands of documents. The 100 ops/sec limit is the real constraint: moderate traffic or inefficient queries can hit this ceiling and cause timeouts. Connection pooling is essential if you're using serverless functions.

MongoDB's document model is genuinely useful for side projects with flexible or evolving schemas. No migrations to run when you add a field, no ALTER TABLE statements, no Prisma schema to regenerate. Just start storing data in whatever shape you need. Atlas Search (full-text search built on Lucene) and Atlas Vector Search are included on free-tier clusters, which is unusual — most providers gate search capabilities behind paid plans. For a side project experimenting with AI features or search functionality, you get those capabilities without upgrading.

Upstash fills a different role than the other databases on this list — it's the free Redis that pairs with your primary database for caching, rate limiting, session storage, and message queuing. The free tier gives you 256 MB of data, 500K commands per month, and 10 GB bandwidth — more than enough to cache your most-accessed queries, implement API rate limiting, and store user sessions for a side project.

The serverless model with REST API access is what makes Upstash particularly suitable for side projects deployed on edge platforms. Traditional Redis requires a persistent TCP connection, which doesn't work with serverless functions that spin up and down. Upstash's HTTP-based Redis client works natively with Vercel Edge Functions, Cloudflare Workers, Deno Deploy, and any serverless runtime. You get Redis semantics without the connection management headache that makes self-hosted Redis painful in serverless architectures.

Beyond Redis, the free tier includes QStash (serverless message queue with 500 messages/day) and Upstash Workflow (durable serverless workflow execution). For side projects that need background job processing — sending emails, processing webhooks, running periodic tasks — QStash replaces the need for a separate job queue service. The pay-as-you-go model after the free tier ($0.20 per 100K commands) means you scale smoothly without a pricing cliff — your side project doesn't jump from $0 to $25/month overnight.