I Moved 7 Side Projects from AWS RDS to Free Postgres — My Bill Went from $47/Month to $0

Description and use

Migrated seven low‑traffic side projects from AWS RDS to free PostgreSQL providers (Neon, Supabase, Turso), cutting monthly costs from $47 to $0 and saving $571 annually.

Problem

Seven low‑traffic side projects were each paying $6‑$8/month on AWS RDS, totaling $47/month for less than 130 daily requests.

Outcome

Migrated 7 projects for $0/month, saving $571/year, with 100% uptime and minimal downtime.

Workflow

• 1. Inventory projects and their DB sizes, request rates, and RDS costs.
• 2. Choose target provider: Neon for fast wake, Supabase for auth, Turso for read‑heavy workloads.
• 3. Create migration script using pg_dump/pg_restore with --no-owner, --no-privileges, --no-tablespaces.
• 4. Run script for each project, adjusting SOURCE and TARGET URLs.
• 5. Resolve provider‑specific gotchas (Neon autosuspend, Supabase pooler, Turso SQLite limitations).
• 6. Verify row counts and uptime after migration.
• 7. Monitor costs and performance for 30 days.
• 8. Document savings and lessons learned.

Evidence

Total: $0/month. Savings: $571/year.

Source

Neon autosuspend kills long queries.

Source

Supabase pooler drops idle connections.

Source

Turso is SQLite, not Postgres.

Source