Neon is a interesting product and they've got some great Postgres engineers. Having said that 1 Second cold starts are still quite painful for a website/web app.
I hope the $19 plans are there to stay - but I somewhat doubt it.
cold starts are 500ms on average, and that's only for the first call that wakes up the db from hibernation. people still seem to think that this latency happens for every call (see other threads here) but once the service has woken up (cold start over) you're back to regular (sub 10ms) latency timings and the service continues to run that way. you'll only hit a cold start again if (you have this option turned on) your service goes idle for > 5 min. You can turn scale-to-zero off and you'll run 24/7, have zero cold starts.
$19 plan is going away, will launch a better $5 plan soon.
I use neon quite a bit, profiling seems to show ~600-980ms of extra latency. This is in the AWS London region, on postgres 15/16.
Regardless if I've got a website that's used a couple of times a hour every hour then the practical reality is almost all users have a extra second of latency or so.
I'm not complaining, it's a great product that I'll continue to use, but it's the biggest pain point.
$19 plan is going away, will launch a better $5 plan soon.