Data warehousing is quickly becoming a commodity through open-source.
I know a company who had 2PBs+ of data in Cloudera. But instead of moving to the cloud (and Databricks), they saved 5X costs by building their own analytics platform with Iceberg, Trino and Superset. The k8s operators are enterprise quality now. On-premises S3 is good, too. You can have great hardware (servers with 128 cpus and 1 TB) and networking.
It's not just Trino. StarRocks and Clickhouse have enterprise grade k8s helm charts/operators. That 60bn valuation is an albtross on Databrick's neck - their pricing will have to justify it, and their core business is commoditizing.
Neon filled their product gap of not having an operational (row-oriented) DB.
On-premise open-source S3 is a problem though. MinIO is not something we're touching and other than that it looks a bit empty with enterprise ready solutions.
hlpn · 57m ago
Totally agree. Happy open source StarRocks user here using the k8s operator for customer-facing analytics on terabytes of data. There's very little need for Databricks in my world.
anilshanbhag · 15m ago
Looking at StarRocks site (https://www.starrocks.io/), they compare against Clickhouse, Druid and Trino. Don't even compare against Spark/Databricks! Guess Spark is just not competitive.
beoberha · 1h ago
Congrats to the Neon team. They make an awesome product. Obviously it’s sad to see this, but it’s inevitable when you’re VC funded. Let’s hope Nikita and co remain strong and don’t let Databricks bit.io them.
Robdel12 · 2h ago
I applied to neon last week and then the news broke about the acquisition. They rejected it this morning — I have never been happier to receive a rejection to an application.
This would’ve been three acquisitions straight for me and… I’m okay, they’re awful. I just want stability.
Congrats to the neon team! I use and love neon. Really hope this doesn’t change them too much.
tedivm · 2h ago
I got hired at Kenna Security a month before they were acquired by Cisco and it was such a miserable experience that I won't work for any company the Kenna leadership are involved with, nor would I ever consider working at Cisco.
no_wizard · 35m ago
Had personally the opposite experience. Acquisitions being one of the most interesting times to be hired into.
In a couple cases I’ve been recruited because I have a history of scaling and integrating acquisitions into companies successfully
flanked-evergl · 4h ago
Maybe unrelated but Databricks is the most annoying garbage I have ever had to use. It fascinates me how anyone uses it by choice.
MOARDONGZPLZ · 14m ago
Databricks is the Jira of dealing with data. No one wants to use it, it sucks, there are too many features to try to appease all possible users but none of them particularly good, and there are substantially better options now than there were not long ago. I would never, ever use it by choice.
mritchie712 · 4h ago
Databricks started in 2013 when Spark sucked (it still does) and they aimed to make it better / faster (which they do).
The product is still centered Spark, but most companies don't want or need Spark and a combination of Iceberg and DuckDB will work for 95% of companies. It's cheaper, just as fast or faster and way easier to reason about.
We're building a data platform around that premise at Definite[0]. It includes everything you need to get started with data (ETL, BI, datalake).
I used to be a big fan of the platform because back in 2020 / 2021 it really was the only reasonable choice compared to AWS / Azure / Snowflake for building data platforms.
Today it suffers from feature creep and too many pivots & acquisitions. That they are insanely bad at naming features doesn't help either.
swalsh · 4h ago
Really hard disagree. Coming from hadoop, databricks is utopia. It's stable, fast, scales really well if you have massive datasets.
The biggest gripe in have is how crazy expensive it is.
willvarfar · 3h ago
Spark was a really big step up from hadoop.
But these days just use trino or whatever. There are lots of new ways to work on data that are all bigger steps up - ergonomically, performance and price - over spark as spark was over hadoop.
disgruntledphd2 · 2h ago
The nice thing about spark is the scala/python/R APIs. That helps to avoid lots of the irritating things about SQL (the same transformation applied to multiple columns is a big one).
DebtDeflation · 1h ago
Hadoop was fundamentally a batch processing system for large data files that was never intended for the sort of online reporting and analytics workloads for which the DW concept addressed. No amount of Pig and Hive and HBase and subsequent tools layered on top of it could ever change that basic fact.
isoprophlex · 4h ago
The market for IBM-like software and platforms (everyone else uses this! It must be good!) apparently wasn't saturated yet
apwell23 · 3h ago
Is hosting spark really that groundbreaking ? Also isn't spark kind of too complicated for 90% of enterprisey data-processing .
I really don't understand the valuation for this company. Why is it so high.
DarkWiiPlayer · 4h ago
With cookies disabled I get a blank website, which is a massive red flag and an immediate nope from me.
Can't imagine someone incapable of building a website would deliver a good (digital) product.
fkyoureadthedoc · 3h ago
They did build a website though. It even looks pretty nice. The restriction you've placed on yourself just prevents you from viewing it.
fuzzy_biscuit · 3h ago
But.. but.... we MUST track you! That's the whole purpose of our site /s
acd10j · 4h ago
Databricks is Oracle-level bad. They will definitely ruin Neon or make it expensive. In the medium to long term, I will start looking for Neon alternatives.
bradhe · 3h ago
Definitely agree, their M&A strategy is setup to strangle whoever they buy and they don't even know it. They're struggling in the face of Iceberg, DuckDB and the other tectonic shifts happening in the open source world. They are trying to innovate through acquisition, but can't quite make it because their culture kills the companies they buy.
I'm biased, I'm a big-data-tech refugee (ex-Snowflake) and am working on https://tower.dev right now, but we're definitely seeing the open source trend supported by Iceberg. It'll be really interesting to see how this plays out.
higeorge13 · 4h ago
Congratz to neon team (i like what they built), but i don’t see the value or relation to databricks. I hope neon will continue as a standalone product, otherwise we lose a solid postgres provider from the market.
rockwotj · 2h ago
Its pretty heavy in Azure, so I would be surprised if it went away. This is DBX play to move into the transactional database space in addition to the analytical database.
presentation · 3h ago
They claim they will in the FAQ… but we know how this usually goes
thayne · 23m ago
If only companies were held liable for breaking promises they made when acquiring other companies
timmg · 4h ago
I remember the first post by the Neon team here on HN. I think I commented at the time that I thought it was a great idea. I’ve never had a need to use them yet, but thought I always would.
Cynically, am I the only one who takes pause because of an acquisition like this? It worries me that they will need to be more focused on the needs of their new owners, rather than their users. In theory, the needs should align — but I’m not sure it usually works out that way in practice.
avinassh · 3h ago
> I remember the first post by the Neon team here on HN. I think I commented at the time that I thought it was a great idea.
Same! I remember it too. I found it quite fascinating. Separation of storage and compute was something new to me, and I was asking them about Pageserver [0]. I also asked for career advice on how to get into database development [1].
Two years later, I ended up working on very similar disaggregated storage at Turso database.
Taking a pause also... I don't believe serving IA can be aligned to serving devs. I hope that the part of the work related to the core of PostgreSQL will help the community.
Congrats folks at Neon! Been following the team and product since the very beginning. Well done, good DX and good education content too :).
This seems like quite the pivot though
kjuulh · 3h ago
Congratulations to the Neon team.
To be honest this is a little sad for me. I'd hoped that Neon would be able to fill the vacuum left by CockroachDB going "business source"
Being bought by DataBricks makes Neon far less interesting to me. I simply don't trust such a large organisation that has previously had issues acquiring companies, to really care about what is pretty much the most important infrastructure I've got.
There certainly is enough demand for a more "modern" postgresql, but pretty much all of the direct alternatives are straying far from its roots. Whether it be pricing, compatibility, source available etc.
Back when I was looking at alternatives to postgres these were considered:
1. AWS RDS: We were already on AWS RDS, but it is expensive, and has scaling and operations issues
2. AWS Aurora: The one that ended up being recommended, solved some operations issues, but came with other niche downsides. Pretty much the same downsides as other wire compatible postgresql alternatives
3. CockroachDB: Was very interesting, wire compatible, but had deeper compatibility issues, was open source at the time, it didn't fit with our tooling
4. Neon: Was considered to be too immature at the time, but certainly interesting, looked to be able to solve most of our challenges, maybe except for some of the operations problems with postgresql, I didn't look deeper into it at the time
5. Yugabyte: interesting technology, had some of the same compatibility issues, but less that the others, as they're also using the query engine from postgresql as far as I can tell.
There are also various self hosting utilities for PostgreSQL I looked at, specifically CloudPG, but we didn't have the resources to maintain a stateful deployment of kubernetes and postgres ourselves. It would fulfill most of our requirements, but with extra maintenance burden, both for Kubernetes and PostgreSQL.
Hosting PostgreSQL by itself, didn't have mature enough replication and operations features by itself at that point. It is steadily maturing, but as we'd got many databases manual upgrades and patches would be very time consuming, as PostgreSQL has some not so nice upgrade quirks. You basically have to unload and reload all data during major upgrades. Unless you use extensions and other services to circumvent this issue.
tuukkah · 3h ago
> 5. Yugabyte: interesting technology, had some of the same compatibility issues, but less that the others, as they're also using the query engine from postgresql as far as I can tell.
Neon is Postgres.
kjuulh · 2h ago
That is why I was hopeful for Neon unlike a lot of the other ones. Yugabyte however isn't just postgres.
phrotoma · 3h ago
> same downsides as other wire compatible postgresql alternatives
I'm interested if you'd care to elaborate.
kjuulh · 2h ago
Mainly in relation to notify/listen and advisory locks. Most of our code bases use advisory lock based migration tools. It would be a large lift moving to an alternative or building a migration scheduler out of process
davidgomes · 3h ago
Hey everyone, I'm an engineer at Neon and I wanted to share this FAQ which covers a lot of the questions that are being brought up in the comments here:
We're really excited about this, and will try to respond to some of the questions people have here later.
jorams · 1h ago
For what it's worth the questions can't really be answered by a simple FAQ, because history has shown that those answers aren't worth the page they're written on. Many companies that get bought talk all about the fact that nothing is going to change.
Something is always going to change, almost always in a way that impacts customers. In the best case it's something simple like a different name on the bill, other times it will leave customers scrambling for an alternative before a ridiculous deadline. It could happen within weeks, after a month, or it might take a year. The answers at the time of the announcement are the same regardless.
joshstrange · 2h ago
That’s a nice FAQ and all but after what happened to bit.io [0] you have to understand why people (like me) are extremely worried about this.
We’ve all read glowing blog posts and reassuring FAQs enough times after an acquisition only to see a
complete about-face a few months or a year later.
I quite enjoyed using Neon but as a solo founder running my business on Neon I can’t help but think it’s insanity to not be looking for alternatives.
Databricks is _not_ a company I trust at all.
[0] if you don’t know, databricks acquired bit.io and shut down all databases within 30 days. Production databases had <30 days to migrate.
ranguna · 31m ago
The FAQ, as meaningless as history as shown it is, is missing one key question: why?
felixrydberg · 3h ago
Will there be a statement about the OSS nature of Neon?
tristan957 · 3h ago
I'm also an engineer at Neon. The plan is to continue developing Neon as an Apache-2.0 licensed software.
Squarex · 4h ago
I’ve loved Neon and now I’m a little worried. Are there any alternatives?
tudorg · 4h ago
[Disclaimer: I work for Xata]
As it happens, we've just launched our new Xata platform (https://xata.io/) which has some of the key Neon features: instant copy-on-write branching and separation of storage and compute. As an extra twist, we also can do anonymization (PII masking) between your production database and developer branches.
The way we do copy-on-write branches is a bit different. We haven't done any modifications to Postgres but do it completely at the storage layer, which is a distributed system in itself. This also brings some I/O performance opportunities.
While Xata has been around for a while, we're just launching this new platform, and it is in Private Beta. But we are happy to work with you if you are interested.
Btw, congrats to the Neon team!
Squarex · 1h ago
Do you support http or websocket connections like https://github.com/neondatabase/serverless? In my experience neon is ultra fast that way in serverless environments like 1-5ms per query with network roundtrip.
Hawxy · 3h ago
The PII masking aspect is very interesting and something we couldn't get when we decided on DBLab a month ago. What does the deployment model within AWS look like?
tudorg · 2h ago
If you want to deploy the whole platform inside your own AWS account, we have a Bring Your Own Cloud model: https://xata.io/byoc
If you want to get anonymization from your RDS/Aurora instance and into Xata branches, then you run only a CLI command (`xata clone`) which does something similar to pg_dump/pg_restore but with masking. It is based on our pgstream open source project.
(Disclaimer: I work at Xata.)
Just wanted to mention that we also support anonymization, in case that’s something you're looking into:
https://xata.io/postgres-data-masking
atombender · 4h ago
Is this open source? A major point of Neon is that it's open source and self-hostable.
tudorg · 3h ago
Several components are open source as their own projects (see below) which will allow you to reproduce most of the features on top of regular Postgres. But the storage part is not open source. We are considering a simpler implementation of it that would be realistic to self-host and still do copy-on-write branching.
These are the open source components:
* pgstream for the anonymization from the production branch
* pgroll for schema changes
* Xata Agent for the LLM-powered optimizations
atombender · 3h ago
I think when people look at Neon, the Aurora-style disaggregated compute/data architecture allowing highly scalable read replicas on cloud storage is the defining feature, and it's the only such project that offers it for Postgres. So the storage part is the point.
devoutsalsa · 11m ago
I’ve had good experiences with Supabase.
Hawxy · 3h ago
If all you care about is the forking aspect we use DBLab Engine pretty effectively: https://postgres.ai/products/dblab_engine. Gets deployed within your own infrastructure.
Databricks in talks to acquire startup Neon for about $1B (174 comments)
jenny91 · 2h ago
It's my understanding that Neon had some tech to basically "wake up" the DB when a request came out -- so you could "scale down to zero," if you will. I was hoping to explore this for small personal projects: I by far prefer Postgres and would love an isolated database per project.
Is there an alternative for that? Scale-to-zero postgres, basically?
ko_pivot · 2h ago
AWS Aurora Postgres Serverless v2 has that capability, though it takes multiple seconds.
ajc23 · 2h ago
[Neon employee] p99 for Neon compute start is 500ms
jamesblonde · 57m ago
Yikes. No real-time ML with that.
joshstrange · 1h ago
AWS Aurora is way too expensive and their "serverless" offerings are overly complicated and not worth it IMHO.
I used Serverless v1 and then they doubled the prices for v2 while removing features so I moved to PlanetScale. They were great but as I grew and wanted multiple smaller DBs they didn't really have a good way to do that and I moved to Neon. Now, with this news, I guess I'll be looking for an alternative.
amazingamazing · 1h ago
Not too familiar with Neon other than the basics - its premise is that you use S3 as bottomless storage for Postgres and it’s otherwise the same as standard Postgres right? And this is all open source? Why are people paying? Can’t you use a cloud provider and have them host this for you?
netvarun · 2h ago
Does anyone have insight into Neon's financials - specifically their revenue, COGS, and gross margins? I'm trying to understand what made Databricks value them at $1B. Was it strong unit economics, rapid growth, or mostly strategic/tech value?
foota · 2h ago
So... As someone who's joining databricks in a few weeks, what's with the hate in the comments?
abxyz · 1h ago
If you're someone who researched the company, enjoyed the interview and accepted an offer, you're probably not going to be in the same group as the people who hate Databricks. Databricks is a 10k people enterprise software company that just raised $10bn and is using their deep pockets to hoover up smaller companies. If that doesn't scare you, you'll be fine. For many of us, the thought of working with or using the product of a company like that strikes fear into our hearts because we have different values to you.
Databricks is the antithesis of Neon. Neon is driven by product, Databricks is driven by sales. Opinions of Databricks in a thread about Neon are going to be on the negative side (but not necessarily representative).
jesseryoung · 49m ago
Welcome to Databricks!
I've been an SA at Databricks for the past two years and love it here. The people you get to work with here are world-class and our customers legitimately love our product.
I too am a little confused about comments in threads on HN about Databricks, they seriously don't reflect what I see internally and what my customers say. I don't think I'd be working here if they did.
ranguna · 24m ago
Hopefully you weren't one of the SAs working on the bit.io migration after databricks acquired them.
datadrivenangel · 1h ago
It's big, enterprise, and competes aggressively on marketing and hype. Also there have been a string of acquisitions where databricks has kind of just absorbed the team and product and then not done a great job for customers of the old company.
It's fine. Probably actually a good place to work.
dan_goosewin · 1h ago
> Neon is valued at $1B;
Neon is still early‑stage and, AFAIK, not profitable. It’s a perfect snapshot of 2025: anything that’s (1) serverless, and (2) even vaguely AI‑adjacent is trading at a multiple nobody would have believed two years ago. Also supports my hypothesis that the next 12 months will be filled with cash acquisitions.
> Databricks will ruin Neon;
I certainly hope not. Focus on DX, friendly free tier, and community support is what made it special. If that vanishes behind Databricks’ enterprise guardrails, the goodwill will vanish with it.
bobxmax · 21m ago
Are people still making comments like these in 2025?
What the hell do profits have to do with valuing tech startups?
bittermandel · 4h ago
Big congratulations!
I really do hope that their OSS strategy does not change due to this, as it's really friendly to people who want to learn their product and run smaller deployments. It's (intentionally or not) really hard to run at a big scale as the control plane is not open-source, which makes the model actually work.
bootsmann · 4h ago
The Databricks vs. Snowflake bidding war is probably an insanely good time to be a database startup.
anentropic · 2h ago
How do they know 80% of Neon databases are created by AI agents?
davidgomes · 2h ago
We can see which database creations are coming from products such as Replit, v0, Same.new, Create.xyz, and a few more etc.
Surely, there might be other agents creating Neon databases so we might be under-counting.
presentation · 4h ago
Guess this is the beginning of the end of a great service, not holding my breath. Sounds like from the WSJ article that they’ll just become some AI agent backend service for Replit, and from the previous conversation on HN that Databricks ruins and shutters their acquisitions. Congrats on the big payout for the employees, though.
At first I thought it had something do to with arm64 SIMD instructions.
barrrrald · 1h ago
congrats to Nikita and all the wonderful folks at Neon!
anshumankmr · 2h ago
What happens to existing customers of Neon?
joshstrange · 2h ago
Ask the bit.io customers….
Most likely a holding state for a bit before databricks ruins it or shuts it down. I started looking around when the news broke last week or so for alternatives.
anshumankmr · 54m ago
Any alternatives that you are aware of ? Most search results show me Supabase.
joshstrange · 50m ago
Supabase is one that I'll consider, Xata [0] is another one that is interesting. Thankfully I just need "postgres", I don't need branching/PII-clearing/etc. That's all nice to have but I don't need it for my app.
I really would prefer a managed DB for multiple reasons but I might need to look at just self-hosting. I might have spent less time futzing with my DB if I had done that from the start instead of going Aurora Serverless v1 -> Planetscale -> Neon.
Crazy how big the data ecosystem has grown. Congrats to the Neon team on a good outcome, but good luck integrating into DBX culture and surviving.
I'm seeing a lot of DBX hate in this thread overall. I think it's warranted. At Tower[0], we're trying to provide a decent open solution. It stars with owning your own data, and Iceberg helps you break free.
I’m incredibly disappointed by this news. I really enjoyed Neon but I seriously doubt I’m going to like Databricks’ stewardship if it. And that’s if they even still care about catering to people like me and don’t jack the prices us.
I guess it’s time to go back to the well of managed/serverless Postgres options…
whobre · 4h ago
A VC funded company that has never been profitable spending a billion on another startup…
Neon filled their product gap of not having an operational (row-oriented) DB.
On-premise open-source S3 is a problem though. MinIO is not something we're touching and other than that it looks a bit empty with enterprise ready solutions.
This would’ve been three acquisitions straight for me and… I’m okay, they’re awful. I just want stability.
Congrats to the neon team! I use and love neon. Really hope this doesn’t change them too much.
In a couple cases I’ve been recruited because I have a history of scaling and integrating acquisitions into companies successfully
The product is still centered Spark, but most companies don't want or need Spark and a combination of Iceberg and DuckDB will work for 95% of companies. It's cheaper, just as fast or faster and way easier to reason about.
We're building a data platform around that premise at Definite[0]. It includes everything you need to get started with data (ETL, BI, datalake).
0 - https://www.definite.app/
Today it suffers from feature creep and too many pivots & acquisitions. That they are insanely bad at naming features doesn't help either.
The biggest gripe in have is how crazy expensive it is.
But these days just use trino or whatever. There are lots of new ways to work on data that are all bigger steps up - ergonomically, performance and price - over spark as spark was over hadoop.
I really don't understand the valuation for this company. Why is it so high.
Can't imagine someone incapable of building a website would deliver a good (digital) product.
I'm biased, I'm a big-data-tech refugee (ex-Snowflake) and am working on https://tower.dev right now, but we're definitely seeing the open source trend supported by Iceberg. It'll be really interesting to see how this plays out.
Cynically, am I the only one who takes pause because of an acquisition like this? It worries me that they will need to be more focused on the needs of their new owners, rather than their users. In theory, the needs should align — but I’m not sure it usually works out that way in practice.
Same! I remember it too. I found it quite fascinating. Separation of storage and compute was something new to me, and I was asking them about Pageserver [0]. I also asked for career advice on how to get into database development [1].
Two years later, I ended up working on very similar disaggregated storage at Turso database.
Congrats to the Neon team!
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31756671
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31756510
WSJ article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/databricks-to-buy-startup-neon-...
This seems like quite the pivot though
To be honest this is a little sad for me. I'd hoped that Neon would be able to fill the vacuum left by CockroachDB going "business source"
Being bought by DataBricks makes Neon far less interesting to me. I simply don't trust such a large organisation that has previously had issues acquiring companies, to really care about what is pretty much the most important infrastructure I've got.
There certainly is enough demand for a more "modern" postgresql, but pretty much all of the direct alternatives are straying far from its roots. Whether it be pricing, compatibility, source available etc.
Back when I was looking at alternatives to postgres these were considered:
1. AWS RDS: We were already on AWS RDS, but it is expensive, and has scaling and operations issues
2. AWS Aurora: The one that ended up being recommended, solved some operations issues, but came with other niche downsides. Pretty much the same downsides as other wire compatible postgresql alternatives
3. CockroachDB: Was very interesting, wire compatible, but had deeper compatibility issues, was open source at the time, it didn't fit with our tooling
4. Neon: Was considered to be too immature at the time, but certainly interesting, looked to be able to solve most of our challenges, maybe except for some of the operations problems with postgresql, I didn't look deeper into it at the time
5. Yugabyte: interesting technology, had some of the same compatibility issues, but less that the others, as they're also using the query engine from postgresql as far as I can tell.
There are also various self hosting utilities for PostgreSQL I looked at, specifically CloudPG, but we didn't have the resources to maintain a stateful deployment of kubernetes and postgres ourselves. It would fulfill most of our requirements, but with extra maintenance burden, both for Kubernetes and PostgreSQL.
Hosting PostgreSQL by itself, didn't have mature enough replication and operations features by itself at that point. It is steadily maturing, but as we'd got many databases manual upgrades and patches would be very time consuming, as PostgreSQL has some not so nice upgrade quirks. You basically have to unload and reload all data during major upgrades. Unless you use extensions and other services to circumvent this issue.
Neon is Postgres.
I'm interested if you'd care to elaborate.
https://neon.tech/databricks-faq
We're really excited about this, and will try to respond to some of the questions people have here later.
Something is always going to change, almost always in a way that impacts customers. In the best case it's something simple like a different name on the bill, other times it will leave customers scrambling for an alternative before a ridiculous deadline. It could happen within weeks, after a month, or it might take a year. The answers at the time of the announcement are the same regardless.
We’ve all read glowing blog posts and reassuring FAQs enough times after an acquisition only to see a complete about-face a few months or a year later.
I quite enjoyed using Neon but as a solo founder running my business on Neon I can’t help but think it’s insanity to not be looking for alternatives.
Databricks is _not_ a company I trust at all.
[0] if you don’t know, databricks acquired bit.io and shut down all databases within 30 days. Production databases had <30 days to migrate.
As it happens, we've just launched our new Xata platform (https://xata.io/) which has some of the key Neon features: instant copy-on-write branching and separation of storage and compute. As an extra twist, we also can do anonymization (PII masking) between your production database and developer branches.
The way we do copy-on-write branches is a bit different. We haven't done any modifications to Postgres but do it completely at the storage layer, which is a distributed system in itself. This also brings some I/O performance opportunities.
While Xata has been around for a while, we're just launching this new platform, and it is in Private Beta. But we are happy to work with you if you are interested.
Btw, congrats to the Neon team!
If you want to get anonymization from your RDS/Aurora instance and into Xata branches, then you run only a CLI command (`xata clone`) which does something similar to pg_dump/pg_restore but with masking. It is based on our pgstream open source project.
Happy to organize a demo any time.
(Disclaimer: I work at Xata.) Just wanted to mention that we also support anonymization, in case that’s something you're looking into: https://xata.io/postgres-data-masking
These are the open source components:
* pgstream for the anonymization from the production branch
* pgroll for schema changes
* Xata Agent for the LLM-powered optimizations
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43899016
Databricks in talks to acquire startup Neon for about $1B (174 comments)
Is there an alternative for that? Scale-to-zero postgres, basically?
I used Serverless v1 and then they doubled the prices for v2 while removing features so I moved to PlanetScale. They were great but as I grew and wanted multiple smaller DBs they didn't really have a good way to do that and I moved to Neon. Now, with this news, I guess I'll be looking for an alternative.
Databricks is the antithesis of Neon. Neon is driven by product, Databricks is driven by sales. Opinions of Databricks in a thread about Neon are going to be on the negative side (but not necessarily representative).
I've been an SA at Databricks for the past two years and love it here. The people you get to work with here are world-class and our customers legitimately love our product.
I too am a little confused about comments in threads on HN about Databricks, they seriously don't reflect what I see internally and what my customers say. I don't think I'd be working here if they did.
It's fine. Probably actually a good place to work.
Neon is still early‑stage and, AFAIK, not profitable. It’s a perfect snapshot of 2025: anything that’s (1) serverless, and (2) even vaguely AI‑adjacent is trading at a multiple nobody would have believed two years ago. Also supports my hypothesis that the next 12 months will be filled with cash acquisitions.
> Databricks will ruin Neon;
I certainly hope not. Focus on DX, friendly free tier, and community support is what made it special. If that vanishes behind Databricks’ enterprise guardrails, the goodwill will vanish with it.
What the hell do profits have to do with valuing tech startups?
I really do hope that their OSS strategy does not change due to this, as it's really friendly to people who want to learn their product and run smaller deployments. It's (intentionally or not) really hard to run at a big scale as the control plane is not open-source, which makes the model actually work.
Surely, there might be other agents creating Neon databases so we might be under-counting.
Most likely a holding state for a bit before databricks ruins it or shuts it down. I started looking around when the news broke last week or so for alternatives.
I really would prefer a managed DB for multiple reasons but I might need to look at just self-hosting. I might have spent less time futzing with my DB if I had done that from the start instead of going Aurora Serverless v1 -> Planetscale -> Neon.
[0] https://xata.io/
I'm seeing a lot of DBX hate in this thread overall. I think it's warranted. At Tower[0], we're trying to provide a decent open solution. It stars with owning your own data, and Iceberg helps you break free.
[0] - https://tower.dev
I guess it’s time to go back to the well of managed/serverless Postgres options…