Neon ships Realtime, turning Postgres queries into live queries
A new public beta lets any SQL query push live updates to the client, with SSR support and instant local writes, so you can drop the polling and refetch code.
Neon released Realtime in public beta on 16 October, turning an ordinary SQL query into a live one that pushes updates to the client as the underlying rows change. There is no separate realtime service to wire up: you enable it on a project and subscribe to a query directly.
neon realtime enable
neon realtime subscribe "SELECT * FROM items"A project can also be bootstrapped straight into a working example with neon bootstrap my-app --template realtime-react. Neon says Realtime works alongside its existing scale-to-zero and branching features, and it is live in four AWS regions: us-east-1, us-east-2, eu-central-1 and ap-southeast-1.
Why it matters: live-updating UI usually means either polling a REST endpoint or standing up a separate realtime layer alongside your database. Subscribing to a query directly on Postgres removes a chunk of that plumbing for anyone already on Neon, particularly for dashboards and collaborative features that only need “when this row changes, tell the client.”
The caveat: it is a public beta, restricted to four regions, with no word yet on pricing once it leaves beta or on behaviour under heavy write load.