Aiven for PostgreSQL Alternatives: What Fits Small Apps

The best Aiven alternatives for PostgreSQL depend on where you sit on Aiven's plan ladder. For small apps that want point-in-time recovery and pooling without jumping to a $75 plan, StitchDB, Neon and DigitalOcean are the usual picks. For apps that want a backend and not only a database, StitchDB and Supabase. For large multi-cloud deployments, Aiven itself is often the right answer, and the alternatives are the clouds' own services.

Aiven is a solid multi-cloud data platform. This guide looks at the specific gaps in its PostgreSQL plans, with prices as of November 2026 from aiven.io/pricing.

#Aiven's PostgreSQL plan ladder

Two things stand out:

1. Point-in-time recovery starts at $75. Free, Developer and Hobbyist plans keep a single backup for disaster recovery. If someone runs a bad UPDATE at 3 pm, you can't go back to 2:59 pm.
2. Connection pooling isn't on Free or Developer. For serverless functions, that matters more than CPU.

Aiven also says it may shut down free services that are unused for an extended period.

#Alternatives that close the gaps

#StitchDB: PITR and pooling on every plan

StitchDB includes point-in-time recovery on all plans: any second of the last 24 hours on Free, 7 days on Pro ($15.99 a month), 14 days on Scale ($49) and 30 days on Enterprise ($329). Every project also has a pooler with session mode (5432) and transaction mode (6543), on Free too.

Beyond full rewinds, you can restore a single table as it was at a moment and copy rows back, without touching the rest of the database (Backups):

-- after "Restore one table" loads orders as of 13:45:01 next to the live table
insert into public.orders
select * from _stitch_restore.orders_20261025_134501
where id = 42
on conflict (id) do nothing;

And a recycle bin per table keeps deleted rows for the plan's retention:

select id, deleted_at, deleted_by, "row" from _stitch_bin.rows
where tbl = 'public.orders'::regclass and restored_at is null
order by id desc limit 20;

select _stitch_bin.restore(array[41, 42]);

Each project also comes with Auth, a REST API, GraphQL, Realtime, Storage and Edge Functions.

Trade-offs versus Aiven: you can't pick a cloud. StitchDB runs in EU data centers in Germany and Finland. There is no high-availability plan tier like Aiven Business, and no other data services like Kafka or OpenSearch next to your database. It is also a younger platform with a smaller community.

#Neon: free tier with branching

Neon's free plan includes 100 CU-hours and 1 GB of storage per project, 6 hours of restore history and pooling up to 10,000 connections per compute. Launch is usage-based ($0.106 per CU-hour, $0.35 per GB-month) with up to 7 days of restore history. Branches make it easy to test against a copy of production. Neon runs on AWS only for new projects, so it doesn't match Aiven's multi-cloud reach.

#DigitalOcean Managed PostgreSQL: simple fixed price with PITR

$15.15 a month for 1 GiB RAM, 1 vCPU and 10 GiB storage, with 7 days of point-in-time recovery and PgBouncer pools. If you are on Aiven Hobbyist on DigitalOcean today, this is the same cloud with PITR at a similar price.

#Supabase: a backend instead of a database

Free tier with 500 MB of database and 50,000 MAU; Pro from $25 a month with 8 GB of disk. PITR is an add-on at $100 a month per 7 days. Good if you want Auth, Storage and Realtime with US or EU regions on AWS.

#Cloud-native managed Postgres

If multi-cloud isn't important but one specific cloud is, the provider's own service (AWS RDS, Google Cloud SQL, Azure Database for PostgreSQL) is the default alternative. On AWS, a db.t4g.micro Postgres costs $0.016 an hour in us-east-1 plus $0.115 per GB-month of gp3 storage (as of November 2026).

#Quick summary

#When Aiven is the right choice

• You need the same Postgres setup on AWS, GCP and Azure, or on clouds such as UpCloud and OVH.
• You need high availability with standby nodes and 14 to 30 days of PITR, and the budget fits Business or Premium.
• You run Kafka, ClickHouse or other services and want one vendor for all of them.

Those are real strengths, and none of the small-app alternatives above matches all of them.

#Moving from Aiven

Aiven gives you a standard postgres:// connection string with sslmode=require. A dump and restore works for any size you can afford to pause writes for:

pg_dump "$AIVEN_URL" -Fc --no-owner --no-privileges -f aiven.dump
pg_restore --no-owner --no-privileges \
  -d "postgresql://p_<ref>_owner:<password>@<db-host>:5432/p_<ref>?sslmode=require" aiven.dump

For a live move, StitchDB's Import from Postgres checks the source for logical replication support (wal_level and the login's replication attribute), copies everything, keeps it in sync and switches over in seconds. If those aren't available on your plan, it does a one-time copy. Afterwards, check Connect to Postgres for the pooled and direct ports.

#What point-in-time recovery costs across these options

Because PITR is the main gap on Aiven's small plans, here is what a 7-day (or nearest) recovery window costs on each option, as of November 2026:

The cheapest way to get a recovery window depends on how much your data changes. Neon bills the history you keep, so a quiet database pays little. Flat plans like DigitalOcean and StitchDB include it regardless of write volume. Whatever you choose, also keep your own off-site pg_dump on a schedule; a provider's backups protect against their failures and your mistakes, not against losing access to the account.

#FAQ

#Does Aiven's free PostgreSQL plan include backups?

As of November 2026, Free, Developer and Hobbyist plans keep a single backup for disaster recovery, with no point-in-time recovery. PITR starts on Startup with 2 days.

#Is there a cheaper Aiven alternative with point-in-time recovery?

Yes. StitchDB includes PITR on every plan (24 hours on Free, 7 days on Pro at $15.99), and DigitalOcean includes 7 days from $15.15 a month.

#Which Aiven alternative supports multiple clouds?

Few small-app hosts do. Aiven's multi-cloud support is one of its main strengths. PlanetScale runs on AWS, GCP and Azure; most others run on one cloud or their own servers.

#Can I keep using the same Postgres extensions?

Most common ones, such as pgvector, PostGIS and pg_trgm, are available on StitchDB, Neon and Supabase. Run the import check or select * from pg_available_extensions to confirm.

Want PITR without the jump to a bigger plan? Compare StitchDB plans or read Postgres point-in-time recovery.