Nile
Nile is Postgres re-engineered for B2B/SaaS multi-tenancy, letting you create unlimited free databases and tenants.
- Card required
- No
Nile scores 4.9/10 for free value in DB. The main constraint: Free plan: unlimited databases and unlimited tenants, 5 GB storage, serverless compute with no cold starts; $1.00 per additional GB.
Free value score
4.9 / 10Show the math
Key metrics
What you get
Unlimited free databases and tenants
5 GB storage on the free plan
No cold starts on serverless compute
Built for B2B/SaaS multi-tenancy
Gotchas
- 50M query tokens/month
Free tier includes 50 million serverless query tokens per month; additional tokens cost $0.06 per million.
- 5 GB storage included
Free plan includes 5 GB of storage; additional storage is $1.00 per GB.
- 500 connections max
Free tier is capped at 500 concurrent database connections, vs 10,000 on Pro.
- No SLA
The free tier has no uptime SLA; Pro offers 99.95% and Scale offers 99.99%.
- No DB or tenant backups
Automated DB-level and tenant-level backups are not available on the free tier (coming soon on paid plans only).
- No workspace sharing
Collaboration via workspace sharing is disabled on the free tier.
- 1-day tenant insights retention
Tenant insights logs are retained for only 1 day on the free tier, vs 2 weeks on Pro.
- No Enterprise SAML or MFA
Enterprise SAML SSO and MFA for auth are not available on the free plan.
- One branch (coming soon)
When branching launches, free tier will be limited to a single branch; Pro gets 50 and Scale gets unlimited.
- Single region placement
Free tier will be limited to one region when global placement launches; paid tiers get 2–5 regions.
- No SOC 2 compliance
SOC 2 certification (coming soon) will be a paid-tier feature only.
- Shared serverless compute
Serverless compute is shared/multitenant infrastructure with no provisioned vCPU options on the free tier.
Sources
-
"Free — For prototyping or side projects. No pauses, always available — $0 ... Serverless compute — 50 million query tokens — $0.06 per million additional tokens ... Storage — 1 GB — $1.50 per additional GB"
https://www.thenile.dev/pricing -
"# of connections — 500 ... SLA — - ... Region availability — All ... Tenant insights — 1 day retention"
https://www.thenile.dev/pricing -
"Does my db pause in the free tier? No, the db never pauses. We don't have any cold start time on the free tier. This is because we have built our serverless compute to be multitenant that lets us provide 'always on' dbs for free tier users."
https://www.thenile.dev/pricing -
"We are excited to announce that we have raised 11.6M in seed funding led by Benchmark and prominent angel investors to build serverless Postgres for modern SaaS"
https://www.thenile.dev/blog/funding-seed
