Your database
Your leads, your orders, your customer records. We write to your database and we do not keep a copy. If the data were ours, you would not own it and you could not get it back if this went wrong.
READ THIS FIRST · THE MISTAKES THAT COST THE MOST
Where this goes wrong
- Free plans at these hosts put limits on how much they will hold, and a quiet project can be paused or scaled down. A business with a quiet winter is exactly when that bites. Tell us your busiest month and we will pick the tier before launch rather than after something breaks.
- Create one project, not three. Three projects means nobody can tell which one is the real one, and we will be building against the wrong one.
- Never send the connection string or the database password by email or in a group chat. That string is the key to every record you hold.
- If you ever paste a connection string into a website to test it, change the password and tell us straight away.
Before you start
If one of these is missing, get it sorted first. It is faster than stalling halfway through.
- The same email address you are using for everything else on this list.
- A rough idea of what will be stored — quote requests, job bookings, orders, customer logins. That is what decides how big the database needs to be.
- A rough idea of where your customers are. The region you choose is the region the data physically sits in.
Do it in this order
Open neon.com and create an account with that email address. Neon is the one we build on, so it is the one we suggest. If you have already picked a different managed Postgres host, tell us which and we will work with that too — but open one, not both.
Create one project. Name it after your business and nothing creative, because you will be looking for it again in six months.
Choose the region closest to where your customers are. Moving data between regions later is not a small job.
Create the database, and let the dashboard generate a strong password for it. Write that password down before you go any further.
Copy the connection string the dashboard gives you. It is one long line beginning with postgres:// . Send it to us through your client portal, not in a chat message.