The understanding of the Neon free tier and the term, compute hours, has been something we are always trying to clear up, so it would not surprise me if the phrasing changed at some point in time, but the free tier has always allowed a user to run a database continuously as far as I remember.

I have had to correct others in our Discord server for instance too.

It wasn't that way last year, and coldstarts were measured in seconds.

I went all the way back to just a few days after I started[0]. I can't find any restrictions on the free tier uptime for the primary/main database in any of the Wayback Machine snapshots of https://neon.tech/pricing.

Last year we did take a lot of heat for cold starts. Here are two blog posts which discuss how we have worked on cold starts.

1. https://neon.tech/blog/cold-starts-just-got-hot

2. https://neon.tech/blog/posix_spawn-close_range-fixed-cold-st...

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230517084346/https://neon.tech...

I can't say this is the disconnect some are having, but it's the one I did until just now. I read "24/7 compute" and assumed that meant no cold starts. It really meant "up to 24/7 uptime but it will still scale to 0 and require cold starts."

The free tier has mentioned that auto-suspend isn't configurable on the free tier for every archive I could find on the Wayback Machine.

If you want an always on compute on the free tier, you can just setup a cron job, and every 4 minutes or so send a "SELECT 1" which will keep the database awake.

There’s a disconnect here. You are 100% technically correct. Your product’s messaging is confusing. Saying “24/7 compute” makes some people think no cold starts. Enough people in fact that you have to keep correcting them.

Nobody knows your product as well as you do.

I'll provide this feedback. Thanks for your explanation.