Best CockroachDB Alternatives for Indie Hackers in 2026

If you were running a side project on CockroachDB's free Basic plan, the pricing page changed under you. On September 15, 2026, Cockroach Labs launched Cockroach Continuum, and the new page lists two Cloud editions. Standard starts at $0.092 per vCPU-hour, which Cockroach Labs estimates at about $203 a month for 2 vCPUs and 100 GB. New organizations get a 30-day trial with $400 in credit, and then the bill starts.

Basic, with its $15 of free usage a month, isn't on that page. Existing customers keep their current plans, per the same page. But anyone starting fresh is looking at a trial, not a free tier.

Most indie hackers never needed multi-region distributed SQL anyway. Prices below were checked on September 23, 2026.

Quick Verdict

Do You Actually Need Distributed SQL?

Be honest about why you picked CockroachDB. If it was the free tier and the Postgres wire protocol, you want a serverless Postgres, and Neon or Supabase will feel the same from your ORM. If it was surviving a region going down, or writing to several regions at once, you need one of the distributed options, and that's a different price bracket everywhere.

Neon

Neon is serverless Postgres that scales compute to zero when idle, and suspended compute costs $0. The Free plan is permanent with no card, and gives you 100 CU-hours per project, 0.5 GB of storage and autoscaling up to 2 CU. Launch is pay-as-you-go at $0.106 per CU-hour and $0.35 per GB-month, with no monthly minimum.

It's real Postgres, so CockroachDB's wire compatibility works in your favour. Your driver doesn't change.

Who shouldn't use it: anyone who needs writes in more than one region. Neon is a single primary. And 0.5 GB fills up faster than you'd think once you store anything real.

Pick this if CockroachDB was just "free Postgres" for you. The Turso vs Neon vs Supabase comparison goes deeper on the trade-offs.

TiDB Cloud

TiDB Cloud Starter has the most generous free quota here. You get 25 GiB of row storage, 25 GiB of column storage and 250 million Request Units a month per organization, free. Past that it's $0.20 per GiB and $0.10 per million RUs. TiDB itself is open source under Apache 2.0.

It's distributed SQL like CockroachDB, but MySQL-compatible rather than Postgres-compatible. That's the dealbreaker for most people leaving Cockroach.

Who shouldn't use it: any Postgres app. Switching dialects means rewriting queries and migrations. The production-grade Essential tier is estimated at about $20 a day for a small production setup, so the jump from free is steep.

Pick this if your app is MySQL-flavoured or you want the most free headroom.

Aurora DSQL

Aurora DSQL is AWS's serverless distributed SQL database, and it's the closest thing to CockroachDB's model. You pay per unit of work, $8 per million DPUs and $0.33 per GB-month in US East (Ohio), and the free tier covers 100,000 DPUs and 1 GB a month.

It speaks the Postgres wire protocol, but it isn't Postgres. It uses optimistic concurrency, so conflicting transactions fail with a serialization error and your code has to retry. A transaction can modify at most 3,000 rows, DDL and DML need separate transactions, and there are no temporary tables and no PL/pgSQL.

Who shouldn't use it: anyone not already on AWS, and anyone whose app runs big batch updates. That 3,000-row limit bites on the first backfill.

Pick this if you're on AWS and multi-region writes are the reason you chose CockroachDB.

YugabyteDB

YugabyteDB is the architectural twin. It's distributed SQL that reuses the Postgres query layer, and the core is open source, free to download and run without restrictions. That's the difference from CockroachDB's self-hosted Enterprise Free license, which is capped at $10 million in revenue and comes with telemetry you can't turn off.

The managed version, YugabyteDB Aeon, starts at $125 per vCPU a month. Its free Sandbox cluster (up to 2 vCPUs, 4 GB of memory, 10 GB of storage) isn't meant for production, caps you at 15 connections, pauses after 10 days of inactivity and gets deleted 5 days after that.

Who shouldn't use it: a solo founder who doesn't want to run a three-node cluster. The managed tier costs more than CockroachDB Standard.

Pick this if you want distributed Postgres on your own servers with no licence strings.

Supabase

Supabase is Postgres plus auth, storage and realtime in one dashboard. Free gives you 2 active projects with a 500 MB database each, and Pro is $25 a month including $10 in compute credits, which covers one Micro instance.

Who shouldn't use it: anyone running a live app on the free tier. Free projects pause after a week of inactivity, which is fine for a prototype and bad for a demo you send to a customer. The Supabase alternatives post covers what to use if that's a problem.

Pick this if you'd rather replace CockroachDB and your auth provider in one move.

How Should You Choose?

For a side project or an early SaaS on one region, Neon. For a full backend in one place, Supabase. If you truly need multi-region writes, pick by cloud and dialect. Aurora DSQL if you're on AWS and want Postgres syntax, TiDB Cloud if you're happy with MySQL, and YugabyteDB if you'd rather own the cluster. The PlanetScale alternatives post covers the last time a free database tier disappeared, and Railway vs Render vs Fly.io covers where the app runs.

And if you're under $10 million in revenue and don't mind the telemetry, self-hosting CockroachDB is still free. That's a valid answer.

Final Recommendation

Neon for almost everyone. It's the same wire protocol, a free plan that doesn't expire and a $0 bill while idle, which is what the old Basic tier gave you. If multi-region is real for you, Aurora DSQL on AWS or YugabyteDB anywhere else.

Found a better option? Let me know on Twitter @devtoolpicks.