Neon alternative

There are roughly 15-25 viable Postgres-as-a-service alternatives in active development (Supabase, PlanetScale, Railway, Render, Fly.io, etc.), but most either optimize for different use cases or introduce their own friction. The pain points are real: Neon's branching feature is powerful but confusing for beginners, cold starts still happen, and pricing becomes unpredictable at moderate scale. The gap isn't in raw functionality—it's in three areas: (1) pricing transparency and predictability for mid-market users, (2) faster onboarding without sacrificing power features, and (3) better developer experience around connection pooling and local-to-production parity. A new entrant should stop trying to replicate everything Neon does and instead own one thing ruthlessly—whether that's the cheapest per-query model, the fastest setup-to-production time, or the best local dev experience. Most competitors fail because they try to be cheaper AND faster AND more featured, which spreads their engineering too thin.