Whether you’re a hobbyist or a professional developer, at some point you’re going to need a database. 😄 We all know the famous solutions like AWS, Azure, or maybe something that’s more affordable like Linode or DigitalOcean, but what if you only need a database to test some of your ideas? 🤔 Spinning up your own instance with Docker or just installing it locally may not always be an option. 😅 I wish there were some database services that would be performant enough for testing your ideas and also were free… Well, guess what? There are! 😎 And in this article, I’m going to show off 5 of them, so you can choose the best one for your project! 🚀

PlanetScale 🌍

PlanetScale is a serverless platform for MySQL which offers really good options on a free tier. 🤩 I think it’d suit most of the developers who want to use MySQL and to save up some money as well. 💵 Here’s a short brief of what the free tier has to offer:

• Storage - 5GB 📦
• Reads per month - 1 Billion 📖
• Writes per month - 10 Million ✍️
• 1 Production Branch 🌳
• 1 Development Branch 🌱

As you see, PlanetScale has a pretty good free tier, but there’s one more service that has even more in theirs, so make sure to read to the end! 😉

Cloudflare D1 🌐

Cloudflare D1 is basically a SQLite database that runs on the edge and is used with Cloudflare Workers. So, if you have your web service deployed to Workers which is also running on the edge, it means that your users will be able to always connect to the closest server and get the least amount of latency for them. ⚡ Here’s a short brief of what the free tier has to offer:

• Serverless SQL Database 🗄️
• Reads per day - 5 Million 📖
• Writes per day - 100K ✍️

If you’re someone who enjoys using Cloudflare Workers, D1 might be the best choice for you, make sure to check it out at - Cloudflare D1. 🎉

Xata 📊

Xata is another serverless relational database that is based on PostgreSQL and ElasticSearch under the hood. 🚀 It treats your tables like a spreadsheet and what’s really cool about it is that it has full-text search built-in. 🔍 No need to duplicate data to an ElasticSearch instance! They have SDKs for many languages and a visual schema editor. Here’s a short brief of what the free tier has to offer:

• 15 GB Storage for your data 📦
• Total records - 750K 📈
• Branches per database - 15 🌳
• Requests per second - 75 ⚡ Make sure to check it out at - Xata. 😃

Fauna 🐾

Fauna is another serverless database created by ex-Twitter engineers. It's kind of like MongoDB, but with native JOIN operations, many document databases miss. They have their own language, FQL, and also a GraphQL API. Here's a quick overview of their free tier:

• 100K TROs (Total Read Operations) 📖
• 50K TWOs (Total Write Operations) ✍️
• 1GB Storage 📦
• 5 Databases 🗄️ Sounds good, but the next one is my personal favorite! 🌟

Neon 💡

Neon is a serverless PostgreSQL option written in Rust. 🎉 It has a great free tier, good docs, and supports data branching for various environments. Here's a glance at their free tier:

• Storage - 3GiB 📦
• Branches - 10 🌳
• Active time per month - 100 hours (Primary branch stays active even if you go over!) ⏳
• History retention - 7 days 🗓️
• Choose the PostgreSQL version and server location 🌍

By far, Neon is my top pick! Check it out for yourself at - Neon. 🚀

Enjoy these databases and happy coding! 😊

Thank you for taking the time to read! :)
All of the stories are also available at my personal website - https://anakidze.dev