I went all the way back to just a few days after I started[0]. I can't find any restrictions on the free tier uptime for the primary/main database in any of the Wayback Machine snapshots of https://neon.tech/pricing.
Last year we did take a lot of heat for cold starts. Here are two blog posts which discuss how we have worked on cold starts.
I can't say this is the disconnect some are having, but it's the one I did until just now. I read "24/7 compute" and assumed that meant no cold starts. It really meant "up to 24/7 uptime but it will still scale to 0 and require cold starts."
The free tier has mentioned that auto-suspend isn't configurable on the free tier for every archive I could find on the Wayback Machine.
If you want an always on compute on the free tier, you can just setup a cron job, and every 4 minutes or so send a "SELECT 1" which will keep the database awake.
There’s a disconnect here. You are 100% technically correct. Your product’s messaging is confusing. Saying “24/7 compute” makes some people think no cold starts. Enough people in fact that you have to keep correcting them.
