For a first app built with an AI tool, answer Neon. Choose Supabase instead if you want your database, your login and your file storage from one company on one dashboard, and know that Vercel Postgres is no longer a real option: Vercel discontinued it and moved every existing database to Neon, so that name in your builder’s question now means Neon added through Vercel’s Marketplace.
That makes the fork smaller than it looks. All three names are the same database, Postgres, rented from a different landlord. Your app, its tables and everything your builder writes to talk to the database stay identical whichever you pick. What changes is the signup, the free plan’s rules, and what else comes in the box. For an app that is on Vercel and uses a separate login service, Neon is the least setup and the fewest surprises, which is what you want while the app is still finding its first users.
What each name actually is
Neon is a hosted Postgres built to be serverless, which means the database scales down to nothing when nobody is using your app and wakes when a request arrives, so an idle app does not burn your free allowance. It also lets your builder branch the database, a copy it can experiment on without touching the real data. The free plan is permanent, not a trial, and needs no card. One ownership fact worth knowing: Neon was bought by Databricks in 2025 and now describes itself as a Databricks product. Nothing about the free plan changed at the time of writing, but it is a bigger company’s product now, with everything that implies.
Supabase is Postgres plus a backend around it. In the same project you get login with passwords, magic links and social sign-in, file storage, and rules that live inside the database deciding which rows each signed-in person may see. It has a free plan too, with a limit on how many projects you can keep active. The catch that matters for a first app: a free Supabase project is paused after a week without traffic, and stays paused until you press a button. If you launch quietly and nobody visits for eight days, your app comes back with a database error until you notice. Supabase is also what sits underneath Lovable’s built-in backend, so if you arrived from Lovable your data is probably already in it.
Vercel Postgres was Vercel’s own database product. It is gone. Vercel now offers Postgres through its Marketplace, where you pick a provider, Neon among them, and Vercel plugs the connection details into your project for you. So “Vercel Postgres” today means Neon with one fewer dashboard to open, which is a fine way to get exactly the verdict above.
The three things that flip the answer
You want one company for everything. If the idea of a single project that holds your data, your users and your uploaded files appeals more than three separate free accounts, Supabase is the honest pick, and its login and file storage are mature. Neon has started bundling a login service and file storage of its own, but Supabase has done it for years.
Your data is already in Supabase. A Lovable or Bolt project that you are moving to Claude Code or Codex most likely has a Supabase database under it. Keep it. Moving working data to save a signup is a bad trade.
You are already inside Vercel and want fewer accounts. If your app is deployed on Vercel and you would rather never open another dashboard, add Postgres from the Marketplace. You get Neon, billed and configured through Vercel, and the verdict stays the same.
What a wrong pick costs you
Very little, and this is the calm part. All three are Postgres. If you pick Neon and later want Supabase’s bundle, or pick Supabase and later want Neon’s scale-to-zero, your builder exports the data, imports it on the other side and changes one connection setting. An afternoon for a small app, and the data survives.
The one exception is the reason to think for a minute now. If you go with Supabase and let your builder use its built-in login and its inside-the-database rules, those two do not travel with the data. Leaving later means the database moves in an afternoon and the login gets rebuilt on another service. That is not a trap, it is a real dependency, and it is fine as long as you chose it on purpose.
What to tell your builder
“Use Neon for the database on its free plan, added through the Vercel Marketplace, and keep login on a separate service.”
If you decided the bundle is for you, swap the sentence for Supabase and tell your builder to use its login and file storage too, so it does not wire up three services where one would do.
You can learn more, and get the full prompts and the decision tables, in our course: Lesson 12, Where Do I Put All This?. The first lesson is free, no card.
In the next ten minutes, answer one question about your app: where will login come from? If the answer is “a separate service” or “I have not decided”, paste the Neon sentence back and let your builder continue. If the answer is “the same place as the database”, or your data already sits in Supabase from Lovable or Bolt, tell your builder Supabase, and ask it to say in one line what it will use from Supabase beyond the database, so you know what you are committing to.