Almost every database question that reaches us is really two questions wearing one coat: is the software free? and what does it cost to run? Those have different answers. PostgreSQL and MySQL are free software. A production PostgreSQL cluster with backups, failover and someone on call is not free, and that gap is where the invoice lives.
This article works through what the vendors themselves publish, on their own pricing pages, read on 23 September 2026. Every figure below is quoted in the currency the vendor prints. Nothing is converted to rupees, because none of these vendors publish INR list prices for these products — your actual bill depends on region, instance size and your cloud contract.
Free software vs paid hosting
Start with licences, since this is where the "is MySQL free" and "is PostgreSQL free" queries come from.
PostgreSQL is released under the PostgreSQL Licence, which the project describes as "a liberal Open Source license, similar to the BSD or MIT licenses". The licence text grants permission to use, copy, modify and distribute the software "for any purpose, without fee, and without a written agreement". There is no paid edition of PostgreSQL itself. Everything you pay for is hosting, support or tooling around it.
MySQL is the more nuanced case. Oracle ships a free Community edition alongside commercial editions sold with support, and the commercial licence matters mainly if you embed MySQL in a product you distribute. We could not verify Oracle's current MySQL licensing or commercial-edition pricing today: mysql.com and Oracle's MySQL pages returned a "Technical Difficulties" error page on every request, so we are deliberately quoting no MySQL licence prices here rather than repeating numbers from memory.
Microsoft is the clearest published example of a paid database engine. On Microsoft's SQL Server 2022 pricing page, the open no-level prices are USD $15,123 per 2-core pack for Enterprise and USD $3,945 per 2-core pack for Standard, with a server licence at USD $989 plus USD $230 per CAL as the alternative Standard model. Two editions are listed as Free: Developer (per user, free download) and Express (free download). So "SQL Server Microsoft" is simultaneously one of the most expensive and one of the genuinely free options, depending on which edition you install.
Microsoft also lists pay-as-you-go billing through Azure Arc for SQL Server 2022: USD $73 per core per month (USD $0.100/hour) for Standard and USD $274 per core per month (USD $0.375/hour) for Enterprise.
| Engine | Software licence | What you actually pay for |
|---|---|---|
| PostgreSQL | PostgreSQL Licence, free, no fee | Hosting, backups, support |
| MySQL | Community edition free; commercial editions sold by Oracle (pricing not verifiable today) | Hosting, or a commercial licence if embedding |
| Microsoft SQL Server | Express and Developer free; Standard USD $3,945 / Enterprise USD $15,123 per 2-core pack | Licence + infrastructure |
| MariaDB | Open source | Hosting or vendor support |
| YugabyteDB | Open source, "free to download and use without restrictions" | Managed Aeon service |
What managed Postgres and MySQL cost
The managed market has settled into two shapes: a flat plan with included quota, or pure usage metering.
Supabase is the flat-plan example, and it is the one most Indian solo founders and small product teams land on. Its pricing page lists a Free plan at $0/month with 500 MB database size, shared CPU and 500 MB RAM, 5 GB egress and 1 GB file storage — with the important caveat printed right there: "Free projects are paused after 1 week of inactivity. Limit of 2 active projects." Pro starts at $25/month, includes the first project, and prices additional projects from $10/mo. Overages on Pro are itemised: $0.125 per GB of disk beyond the included 8 GB, $0.09 per GB of egress beyond 250 GB, $0.0213 per GB of file storage beyond 100 GB, and $0.00325 per monthly active user beyond 100,000. Team starts at $599/month and is where SOC 2 and ISO 27001, SSO and 14-day backups appear; Enterprise is quoted as "Custom".
Supabase also publishes its compute ladder separately, and this is the line item people miss. Paid plans include $10/month in compute credits, enough for one Micro instance. Larger instances are listed at $15/mo (2 GB RAM), $60/mo (4 GB), $110/mo (8 GB), $210/mo (16 GB), $410/mo (32 GB) and $960/mo (64 GB). So "Supabase Pro is $25" is true only for a workload that fits on shared compute.
Neon takes the metered route. Its Free plan is listed at $0/month with 0.5 GB of storage per project. Launch and Scale are described as usage-based rather than flat: Launch bills $0.106 per compute-unit-hour and $0.35 per GB-month of database storage, and Neon shows a typical spend of $15/mo for intermittent load on 1 GB. Scale bills $0.222 per CU-hour on the same $0.35 per GB-month storage, with a typical spend shown as $701/mo for high load on 100 GB. Both tiers also list $0.002 per branch-hour and $0.09/GB-month for instant-restore storage.
PlanetScale, the managed MySQL option, publishes entry points rather than a plan table: "Starting at $5/month" for development and low-traffic production workloads, and "Starting at $50/month" for the tier with high-performance local NVMe storage, with a calculator for month-to-month spend.
If you are already on AWS, Amazon's RDS pricing page confirms the free-tier entry point for new accounts: 750 hours per month on a selection of Single-AZ instance databases, 20 GB of gp2 storage and 20 GB of backup storage, for one year. It also documents the trap that catches teams who stay on an old version — RDS Extended Support for MySQL 5.7 in US East (Ohio) is billed at $0.100 per vCPU-hour from March 2024, rising to $0.200 per vCPU-hour from 1 March 2026.
When a warehouse beats a database
"Snowflake vs SQL" is a category confusion more than a comparison. A transactional database serves your application: small reads and writes, indexed lookups, row locks. A warehouse like Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift or Databricks is built to scan very large tables for analysis, decoupling storage from compute so you can throw a big cluster at a query for ninety seconds and then stop paying for it.
The honest rule: you need a warehouse when analytics queries start hurting the database your product depends on, or when you need to join data from several systems that no single application database owns. Until then, a read replica of your Postgres and a BI tool like Microsoft Power BI or Tableau on top of it will do the job for a fraction of the cost.
On price, Snowflake's own pricing page is explicit about the model and vague about the number by design. It describes "a consumption-based pricing model", lists four editions — Standard, Enterprise, Business Critical and Virtual Private Snowflake — and requires you to select a platform and region before rates appear; storage is billed as "a monthly fee for data stored in Snowflake… calculated using the average amount of storage used per month, after compression". Snowflake publishes its per-credit rates in the Snowflake Service Consumption Table rather than as a flat monthly price, so anyone quoting you "Snowflake costs $X/month" is guessing. Budget by credits consumed, not by seats.
Alternative databases worth a look
For teams asking about alternative databases or YugabyteDB alternatives, the distributed-SQL and managed-open-source field has real published pricing:
- YugabyteDB — the open source database is free; the managed Aeon service starts at $125 per vCPU per month (Standard) and $167 per vCPU per month (Professional), with Enterprise quoted on request. Storage is extra at $0.10/GB per month, cloud backup storage at $0.025/GB per month, and internet data transfer at $0.10/GB. Enterprise Security and Business Continuity/DR are $25 per vCPU per month each as Professional add-ons.
- CockroachDB — the other distributed SQL option if you need multi-region writes.
- ClickHouse — for analytical workloads that don't justify a full warehouse.
- MongoDB Atlas and Redis — where your access pattern is documents or key-value rather than relational.
- Firebase vs Microsoft Azure — the "firebase vs azure" comparison is really BaaS versus full cloud platform. Firebase is a fast path to a working mobile backend; Azure is where you go when you need the surrounding estate. Browse the full database software and cloud platforms categories before committing.
Backup: the line nobody budgets
Every plan above includes some backup retention (Supabase: 7 days on Pro, 14 on Team), and none of it is a disaster-recovery strategy on its own. AWS Backup centralises backups across RDS, EBS, DynamoDB, EFS and more; its pricing page bills per GB-month of warm and cold backup storage, split by source service — the page renders live regional rates rather than static figures, so check it for your region rather than trusting a blog number (including this one). Independent tools like Veeam and Acronis Cyber Protect sit in the backup software category if your estate spans more than one cloud.
For on-premises and private-cloud estates, Nutanix markets a Database Service that automates provisioning, patching and copy data management across PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle and MongoDB on its own infrastructure. Nutanix does not publish list pricing for the Database Service on that product page — the figures it does show are ROI and TCO claims from customer studies, not rates — so treat it as a sales-led purchase.
FAQ
Is MySQL free?
MySQL Community edition is free to download and use, and Oracle also sells commercial MySQL editions with support, which matter mainly if you embed MySQL in software you distribute. We could not verify current MySQL licence or commercial pricing today because mysql.com and Oracle's MySQL pages returned a service-error page on every request, so no MySQL prices are quoted in this article. Hosting MySQL is separate: PlanetScale starts at $5/month, and Amazon RDS for MySQL is included in the AWS Free Tier for 12 months on new accounts.
Is PostgreSQL free?
Yes. PostgreSQL is released under the PostgreSQL Licence, which the project calls a liberal open source licence similar to BSD or MIT, and which grants use, copying, modification and distribution "for any purpose, without fee, and without a written agreement". There is no paid edition. What costs money is running it: Supabase Pro from $25/month, Neon Launch at $0.106 per compute-unit-hour plus $0.35 per GB-month, or your own server plus your own on-call rota.
What does Supabase cost beyond the free plan?
Supabase lists Free at $0/month (500 MB database, 5 GB egress, projects paused after a week of inactivity, two active projects maximum), Pro from $25/month with the first project included and additional projects from $10/mo, Team from $599/month for SOC 2, ISO 27001 and SSO, and Enterprise as custom. Add compute: paid plans include $10/month of compute credits, and larger instances are listed from $15/mo up to $960/mo for 64 GB RAM.
How much does Microsoft SQL Server cost?
Microsoft's SQL Server 2022 page lists open no-level prices of USD $15,123 per 2-core pack for Enterprise and USD $3,945 per 2-core pack for Standard, or USD $989 per server plus USD $230 per CAL. Developer and Express editions are listed as free downloads. Through Azure Arc, pay-as-you-go is USD $73 per core per month for Standard and USD $274 per core per month for Enterprise.
Snowflake vs SQL database — which do I need?
A SQL database serves your application's reads and writes; Snowflake is a warehouse for scanning large volumes of data for analysis. Choose the warehouse when analytics queries are degrading your production database, or when you must join data across systems. Snowflake prices by consumption — four editions, per-credit rates that depend on the cloud platform and region you select, plus a monthly storage fee based on average compressed storage — so there is no flat monthly price to compare against a database instance.
Are there free alternatives to paid databases?
Yes, several. PostgreSQL, MySQL Community, MariaDB and the open source edition of YugabyteDB are all free to download and run, and Yugabyte states plainly that its open source database is "free to download and use without restrictions" while the managed service is the paid offering. SQL Server Express and Developer are free downloads from Microsoft. The trade you make is operational: you own the backups, upgrades, failover and monitoring that a managed plan bundles into its monthly price.
Sources
- Supabase pricing — https://supabase.com/pricing
- Neon pricing — https://neon.com/pricing
- PlanetScale pricing — https://planetscale.com/pricing
- PostgreSQL licence — https://www.postgresql.org/about/licence/
- Microsoft SQL Server 2022 pricing — https://www.microsoft.com/en-in/sql-server/sql-server-2022-pricing
- Snowflake pricing options — https://www.snowflake.com/en/pricing-options/
- Yugabyte pricing — https://www.yugabyte.com/pricing/
- Amazon RDS for MySQL pricing — https://aws.amazon.com/rds/mysql/pricing/
- AWS Backup pricing — https://aws.amazon.com/backup/pricing/
- Nutanix Database Service — https://www.nutanix.com/products/database-service
