> Scale to zero, what the first query after a quiet spell costs, and what that saves. # Sleeping and waking A database with nothing connected to it **stops after five minutes** and starts again on the next connection. This is the single fact that makes a database per project affordable, and the single thing that will surprise you. ## What it costs you The first connection after a quiet spell waits **a second or two** while the compute starts. Everything after that is a normal Postgres connection with no penalty at all, and the compute stays up for five minutes past the last one. An application with steady traffic never sees it. A staging environment nobody touched since Friday sees it on Monday morning, once. ## What it saves you Compute is billed only while it is awake. A project that gets a visitor an hour pays for a few minutes of compute a day rather than for a server running all night — which is the difference between a database costing pennies and costing dollars. Storage is unaffected: your data is held whether the compute is up or down, and that is the part the [minimum](/docs/data-api) covers. ## Do not keep it awake The obvious trick — a cron job pinging the database every four minutes — costs more than it saves. It converts a few minutes of daily compute into twenty-four hours of it, to avoid a delay measured in seconds, on requests nobody is waiting for. If a cold start genuinely hurts on a user-facing path, the honest fixes are: - **Connect at the edge of the request, not lazily mid-render.** The wake happens in parallel with the rest of your page rather than after it. - **Cache what does not need to be live.** A homepage that reads the same six rows every time should not be waking a database to do it. - **Tell us.** The idle timeout is per project and adjustable; longer costs more and we will say by how much. ## Autoscaling, while it is awake The compute moves between **0.25 and 4 CU** on its own, following what your queries need. You are billed for what it actually used, per compute-hour, not for the ceiling. Neon's own default for a new project is a fixed 1 CU. Ours starts at a quarter of that deliberately: a quiet site should not pay for a whole compute unit because somebody visited it. If your workload needs more than four CU, that is a conversation rather than a limit — but it is usually a query that wants an index.