Hosting and databases

Supabase vs Firebase: free tiers, pricing and lock-in compared

Stack Founder HQ · Updated 18 October 2026 · Hosting and databases · How we write

Supabase and Firebase both give you a hosted backend: a database, authentication, file storage and server-side functions, with client libraries so you can build an app quickly. They differ in one fundamental way. Supabase is built on Postgres, a relational SQL database. Firebase's main databases, Cloud Firestore and the Realtime Database, are NoSQL document stores. That choice affects how you model data, how you query it and how hard it is to leave, more than any price difference does.

*Prices and limits below were checked on 18 October 2026 on supabase.com/pricing and firebase.google.com/pricing. Prices are in US dollars. Always check the pricing pages before you commit.*

Free tiers

	Supabase Free	Firebase Spark (no-cost)
Database	500 MB Postgres database	Firestore: 1 GiB stored, 50,000 reads, 20,000 writes and 20,000 deletes per day
Auth	50,000 monthly active users	50,000 monthly active users, no cost (phone sign-in is billed per SMS)
File storage	1 GB	Cloud Storage free quota (see Firebase pricing page)
Egress	5 GB	Firestore: 10 GiB per month outbound
Functions	500,000 Edge Function invocations	Cloud Functions require the Blaze plan
Catch	Projects are paused after one week of inactivity, with 2 active projects	Some products need Blaze, the pay-as-you-go plan

Both free tiers are generous enough to build and launch a small app. The catches are different. Supabase pauses inactive free projects, which matters for demos and side projects that get little traffic. Firebase puts Cloud Functions on its paid Blaze plan, so many apps that need server-side logic end up on Blaze sooner than expected.

Paid pricing

Supabase Pro starts at $25 a month per organisation. According to Supabase's pricing page, it includes:

8 GB of disk per project
100,000 monthly active users, then $0.00325 per additional MAU
250 GB of egress and 100 GB of file storage
$10 of compute credits, which covers one Micro compute instance
daily backups kept for seven days

A spend cap is switched on by default on Pro, which limits usage charges beyond the included quotas. Turning it off lets you go over the quotas and pay for the extra. The Team plan is $599 a month, which Supabase describes as adding features such as SSO, control over backups and industry certifications.

Firebase Blaze is pay-as-you-go. It includes the same no-cost usage as Spark, and you pay only for usage beyond it. Cloud Functions, for example, include 2 million invocations a month on Blaze, then cost $0.40 per million. Firebase Hosting includes 10 GB of storage and 360 MB of data transfer per day before charges apply.

The pricing models suit different situations:

Supabase has a predictable base fee. Your bill is roughly $25 a month until you outgrow the quotas. Each extra project needs its own compute, which costs extra beyond the included credit.
Firebase can cost nothing for a long time and then grow with usage. Costs follow reads, writes and transfer, so an inefficient query pattern, such as reading a whole collection on every page load, shows up directly on the bill. Google Cloud budgets and alerts are worth setting up from day one.

Data model and querying

Supabase (Postgres) gives you tables, joins, foreign keys, transactions, views and SQL. Its auto-generated APIs sit on top of the database, and access is controlled with Postgres row-level security policies. If your data is relational, such as users, teams, invoices and line items, it fits naturally.

Firestore stores documents in collections. It scales automatically and has excellent real-time listeners and offline support in its mobile SDKs. However, queries are more limited than SQL, and data is often denormalised (duplicated across documents) to fit read patterns. Security is defined in Firebase Security Rules.

Lock-in and portability

This is where the two differ most:

Supabase is open source and uses standard Postgres, so you can export your database with standard Postgres tools and run it elsewhere, including self-hosting Supabase. Your SQL schema and queries move with you. Auth and storage need more work to migrate, but the core data is portable.
Firebase is proprietary to Google. You can export Firestore data, but moving away usually means rewriting your data layer and security rules for a different kind of database.

Other differences to check

Mobile. Firebase has a long track record on Android and iOS, with features such as Cloud Messaging, Crashlytics and Remote Config alongside the database. If you are building a mobile-first app, these extras count in its favour.
Region. Both let you choose where data is stored. If you serve UK or EU customers, pick a region that matches your data protection approach, and record it in your privacy notice.
Local development. Supabase has a CLI that runs a local stack. Firebase has the Local Emulator Suite. Both are mature.

Which to choose

Choose Supabase if your data is relational, you want SQL, you value being able to move to plain Postgres later, and a fixed $25 a month suits your budget once you go beyond the free tier.
Choose Firebase if you are building a mobile app that benefits from Firebase's wider toolkit, your data is naturally document-shaped, and you would rather pay purely for usage.

For many small SaaS products, the deciding factor is the data model. Pick the database that fits your data, and the pricing usually follows.