When you scale something to 0, indeed there are issues with cold starts. On the Neon free tier, you will get a cold start if your database is inactive for 5 min

When you scale something to 0, indeed there are issues with cold starts. On the Neon free tier, you will get a cold start if your database is inactive for 5 minutes (you can configure this value on paid plans). As an exercise, I decided to try for myself what my cold start time is + query round trip, on Neon's free tier. Note that I am in Austin connecting to us-east-2. $ time psql -c 'SELECT 1' 'postgresql://neondb_owner:<password>@<endpoint>.us-east-2.aws.neon.tech/neondb?sslmode=require' Null display is "(null)". ?column? ---------- 1 (1 row) real 0m1.156s user 0m0.036s sys 0m0.020s You can't make a trend out of 1 data point, but thought I would provide it nonetheless.