Neon makes it easy to embed Lakebase Postgres, Neon’s database, into your platform with one-second provisioning, autoscaling, and scale-to-zero, so each user gets an isolated database without the overhead. Databases are provisioned via API and fully integrated into your product, with no Neon signup or setup required.
Our Solutions Engineers have helped platforms like yours embed Lakebase Postgres at scale. Tell us about your use case. We’ll help you design the right approach.
Uniquely built to scale Postgres fleets
Neon is built for deploying one-database-per-user fleets of Lakebase Postgres at scale. You don’t need a DevOps team to manage a large Neon fleet – the Neon API lets you track usage, enforce limits, and scale programmatically. With pay-per-use pricing and automatic scale-to-zero, you’ll spend a fraction of what you'd pay on AWS. What you get:
- Dedicated connection strings for every user or project - every user gets their own secure, isolated Postgres project
- High connection capacity - pooled endpoints support up to 10,000 connections
- Full Postgres compatibility - no proprietary query layer
- Custom branching and PITR - instant copies and rollbacks, no manual backups
- All of this is available across multiple regions, with autoscaling and high availability
"We’ve been able to automate virtually all database management tasks via the Neon API. We manage 300,000+ projects with minimal engineering overhead."
With instant provisioning and scale-to-zero
Lakebase Postgres databases on Neon provision in less than a second and automatically suspend when idle, with no compute cost until the next query. You can offer every user their own Postgres database without incurring the cost of idle infrastructure. That is what the lakebase architecture makes possible for platforms: dedicated Postgres per user, with shared-infrastructure economics.
- Provisioning time: ~1 second
- Suspend latency: configurable (default is 5 min)
- Resume latency (cold start): ~500ms
Read about the benefits of database-per-user architectures for scalability
API-first management
Neon’s API is purpose-built to help platforms manage large fleets of Lakebase Postgres databases with minimal engineering effort. We’ve continuously improved our API in collaboration with 20+ partners, each pushing the boundaries of scale and automation. Via the Neon API, you can:
- Provision new databases instantly
- Set per-project resource limits to support free, pro, and enterprise plans
- Scale compute up or down per user or tier
- Automatically suspend inactive databases to reduce costs
- Monitor usage across thousands of projects
- Update quotas and configurations without downtime
…and more
Retool uses the Neon API to manage over 300,000 databases with just one engineer, handling everything from provisioning to quota enforcement.
Built-in quotas and billing controls
Neon allows you to easily define usage limits per project to manage cost and enforce pricing tiers. As users upgrade or change plans, you can dynamically update limits via API, without downtime or user impact.
- Set maximum allowed storage
- Cap CPU usage
- Limit egress by plan
- Track and cap monthly data written
- Customize suspend timeouts for different tiers
…and more
Koyeb’s Database Instance Types sets an example of how to use Neon’s quota controls to define compute, storage, write, and data transfer limits per plan.
Tracking usage at scale
Neon also provides rich consumption APIs for observability at scale:
| Endpoint | Description | Availability |
|---|---|---|
| Account-level cumulative metrics | Granular project-level metrics | Single project metrics |
| Aggregate metrics across all projects in the account | Usage metrics per project at hourly, daily, or monthly granularity | Detailed metrics and quota info for an individual project |
| Scale and Business plans | Scale and Business plans | All plans |
You can use these to:
- Monitor total usage across all projects for a billing period
- Break down metrics by project or time range (hourly, daily, monthly)
- Power usage-based billing or internal dashboards
Learn how to query consumption metrics via the API
"Neon’s serverless philosophy is aligned with our vision (no infrastructure to manage, no servers to provision, no database cluster to maintain) making them the obvious partner to power our serverless Postgres offering."
Built for your platform, not ours
We’re not trying to own your user experience. We’re here to power it. You can integrate Neon invisibly behind the scenes, whether you want to use our OAuth integration or manage Neon projects directly via API. You decide how Lakebase Postgres shows up in your UI, we take care of the rest.
Beyond the database: Neon backend primitives
Lakebase Postgres is the core of what platforms embed today. When your product needs more than a database, Neon is also a complete set of cloud backend primitives built around that same Lakebase Postgres foundation. You can expose them to end users the same way you embed the database: via API, behind your own UI, with no separate Neon signup.
Optional primitives that sit on the same project and branch lifecycle:
- Managed Better Auth - authentication and identity stored in Postgres, branchable with the database
- Data API - PostgREST-compatible HTTP access to each database and branch
- Object Storage - S3-compatible files and blobs with per-branch isolation
- Functions - long-running Node.js compute next to the data
- AI Gateway - one credential for frontier and open-source models
Adopt only what each generated app needs. Keep Lakebase Postgres as the default, and turn on Auth, storage, functions, or model access when a user’s app requires a fuller backend, without sending them to another vendor.
For agent platforms and full-stack codegen, see also Neon for AI Agent Platforms.
We’re happy to support proof-of-concepts, provide technical guidance, and share best practices from other platforms.