Supabase Pricing Explained: Is the Free Tier Enough for Your Startup?

Supabase has emerged as the leading open-source Firebase alternative, offering a full suite of backend services including PostgreSQL database, authentication, storage, real-time subscriptions, and edge functions. As we move through 2026, understanding the platform's pricing structure is critical for developers building everything from hobby projects to enterprise-scale applications. The good news: Supabase remains one of the most developer-friendly platforms with a generous free tier that never expires.

Unlike many cloud providers that offer only a 12-month free trial, Supabase's free tier is permanent. You get 500 MB of database storage, 50,000 monthly active users (MAUs), and unlimited API requests at no cost. This makes it ideal for learning, prototyping, and even running small production apps with light traffic. However, as your application grows, you'll need to understand how compute, storage, egress, and add-ons impact your monthly bill.

In this comprehensive guide, I'll break down every aspect of Supabase pricing in 2026: from the free tier's exact limits to Pro and Team plan structures, compute scaling costs, overage fees, and how Supabase compares to running your own PostgreSQL on AWS RDS. Whether you're a solo developer, a startup founder, or an enterprise architect, this guide will help you forecast costs and choose the right plan for your needs.

Supabase Free Tier: What You Get for $0

The Free Plan on Supabase is remarkably generous and never expires, making it one of the best free tiers in the cloud database space. You receive 500 MB of database storage with shared CPU resources and up to 0.5 GB of RAM. The plan includes 1 GB of file storage for assets like user avatars or documents, plus 5 GB of database egress and 5 GB of cached egress per month. Authentication supports up to 50,000 monthly active users with unlimited API requests, which is substantial for most hobby projects and MVPs .

Real-time features are included with 2 million messages per month and 200 concurrent connections. Edge Functions receive 500,000 monthly invocations at no cost. However, there are important limitations: free projects are automatically paused after one week of inactivity, and you're limited to two active projects per organization. The free tier does not include daily backups beyond simple snapshots, nor does it offer point-in-time recovery (PITR), SSO, or SLA guarantees. Community support is available, but there's no priority response time .

For developers learning Supabase, building internal tools, or running small personal projects with light traffic, the free tier is more than sufficient. It's also excellent for staging and testing environments before moving to production. The key decision point is whether you need more than 500 MB of database storage, more than 50,000 MAUs, or production-grade features like automated backups and log retention.

Pro Plan: Production-Ready at $25/Month

The Pro Plan starts at $25 per month per project and includes everything from the free tier plus substantial upgrades. You get 8 GB of database storage (up from 500 MB), 100 GB of file storage, and 250 GB of egress bandwidth. Monthly active users increase to 100,000 included, with overage pricing at $0.00325 per additional MAU. The Pro plan also includes a critical feature for production: daily backups stored for 7 days and 7-day log retention .

One of the most valuable components of the Pro Plan is the $10 monthly compute credit. This credit covers the full cost of running one project on the Micro compute size (2-core ARM shared CPU, 1 GB RAM) or offsets part of the cost for larger compute instances. Without the credit, the Micro compute alone would cost approximately $10 per month, so the effective price for the Pro Plan becomes $15 after the credit if you stay on Micro compute .

The Pro Plan also unlocks advanced features like custom domains for branded APIs, IPv4 addresses (additional cost), and the ability to provision additional disk IOPS and throughput. Email support is included, providing faster response times than community support. For most startups and small to medium production applications, the Pro Plan offers the best balance of features, performance, and predictable pricing.

Team and Enterprise Plans: Scaling with Compliance

For organizations requiring SSO, audit logs, and higher usage quotas, the Team Plan builds directly on the Pro foundation with additional enterprise features. While the base pricing starts similarly at $25 per month per project, the Team Plan includes higher MAU limits, SSO authentication, and audit logging for security compliance. Team plans are designed for growing companies that need centralized user management and enhanced security controls .

The Enterprise Plan offers custom pricing for large-scale deployments with strict compliance requirements. This includes SOC 2 Type II certification, HIPAA compliance for healthcare applications, private VPC deployment for network isolation, regional data replication, and point-in-time recovery (PITR) for granular backup restoration. Enterprise customers also receive custom SLAs guaranteeing uptime and performance, plus dedicated support with faster response times .

It's important to note that Supabase bills on an organization basis, not per project. Each organization has a single subscription plan (Free, Pro, Team, or Enterprise) that applies to all projects within that organization. You cannot mix different plans in one organization. If you need some projects on Pro and others on Free, you must create separate organizations. This architecture encourages consolidating workloads but requires planning for multi-project setups .

Compute Pricing: Hourly Rates from $0 to $5,000+

Compute is one of the most important factors in your Supabase bill. Each project runs on a dedicated Postgres instance with its own compute resources. Supabase charges hourly for compute based on the instance size, with pricing ranging from $0 for the Nano (free tier only) to over $5 per hour for 64-core instances. The table below shows the complete compute pricing structure for 2026 :

Compute is billed by the hour, and you pay for full hours even if your project runs for only part of an hour. For example, if you upgrade from Micro to Small at 4:30 PM, you'll be billed for a full hour of Micro (4:00-5:00 PM) and a full hour of Small (4:30-5:30 PM). This prorated billing applies to any compute size changes during your billing cycle .

The $10 compute credit on Pro and Team plans applies only to compute costs, not to other line items like storage, egress, or read replicas. If you run multiple projects, each adds its own compute cost, though the credit applies once per organization. For a single project on Micro compute, the credit fully offsets the compute cost. For two Micro projects, total compute would be $20 minus the $10 credit, leaving $10 in compute charges plus the $25 Pro plan fee, totaling $35 per month .

Storage and Egress: Understanding Overage Costs

Database storage beyond included quotas incurs overage fees at $0.125 per GB per month for gp3 disks. The Free Plan includes 500 MB per project, while Pro and Team include 8 GB per project. If you need additional database storage, you can provision up to 16 TB on gp3 disks or 60 TB on high-performance io2 disks. The io2 option costs $0.195 per GB and is designed for low-latency, high-IOPS workloads like financial trading platforms or real-time analytics .

File storage for assets like images, videos, and documents follows similar overage pricing: $0.021 per GB per month beyond the included 1 GB (Free) or 100 GB (Pro/Team). Storage is billed based on the total size of all assets in your buckets, measured in GB-hours. For example, if you store 150 GB for half the month, you're billed for the average usage .

Network egress (data transferred out of Supabase to the internet or other services) costs $0.09 per GB beyond included quotas. The Free Plan includes 5 GB of egress, while Pro and Team include 250 GB. Egress is often the hidden cost in cloud databases, especially for applications serving large files, images, or API responses to many users. Cached egress, where data is served from Supabase's CDN, is included in the same quota and counts against your limit .

Auth, Realtime, and Edge Functions: Usage-Based Pricing

Supabase Auth pricing is based on Monthly Active Users (MAUs). Free: 50,000 MAUs included. Pro/Team: 100,000 MAUs included, then $0.00325 per additional MAU. For applications with SSO (single sign-on) requirements, the first 50 SSO MAUs are included on Pro/Team, with overage at $0.015 per MAU. This makes Supabase very cost-effective for apps with standard email/password or social login, but SSO-heavy enterprise apps should budget accordingly .

Realtime features enable live subscriptions to database changes. The Free Plan includes 2 million messages per month and 200 concurrent connections. Pro/Team increases this to 5 million messages and 500 connections, with overage at $2.50 per million messages and $10 per 1,000 additional concurrent connections. For apps with heavy real-time requirements like chat, live dashboards, or collaborative editing, these limits can add up. However, the "no spend cap" option on Pro allows you to increase concurrent connections up to 10,000 and messages to 2,500 per second with custom pricing .

Edge Functions allow you to run serverless TypeScript functions at the edge. Free: 500,000 invocations per month. Pro/Team: 2 million invocations included, then $2 per million additional invocations. Edge Functions are best suited for lightweight logic like authentication hooks, data validation, or API proxy routing. For heavy compute workloads, consider using dedicated compute or database functions instead.

Supabase vs AWS RDS: Cost Comparison for 2026

One of the most common questions developers ask is how Supabase pricing compares to running PostgreSQL on AWS RDS. The answer depends heavily on your workload, scale, and willingness to manage infrastructure. For entry-level production workloads, Supabase Pro at $25/month (including compute credit) compares favorably to RDS t4g.micro at $11.68 on-demand, but Supabase includes 8 GB storage, 250 GB egress, and built-in auth/realtime features that would cost extra on AWS .

At mid-tier production scale (8 GB RAM, 100 GB storage, 500 GB monthly egress), Supabase Large compute ($110/month + $22.50 egress overage) totals approximately $145 per month. AWS RDS m5.large on-demand with 100 GB gp3 storage and 500 GB egress would cost around $186 monthly. However, if you commit to 3-year reserved instances, RDS can drop to $112.50, undercutting Supabase. The trade-off is operational complexity: Supabase handles backups, replication, monitoring, and scaling automatically, while RDS requires manual configuration of these features .

For heavy workloads with 500 GB storage and 1 TB monthly egress, Supabase 2XL at $410/month (all-inclusive) totals $477.50 with egress overage. AWS RDS r5.xlarge on-demand with io1 storage (required for high IOPS) would exceed $700 monthly. Even with 3-year reserved instances, AWS remains competitive only if your workload is stable and you can commit long-term. Supabase's all-inclusive pricing model becomes increasingly attractive at scale, especially for teams without dedicated database administrators .

Disk Performance and IOPS: What You Need to Know

Supabase uses high-performance SSD disks with performance characteristics tied to compute size. Smaller instances (Nano through Medium) use shared CPUs with burstable performance. They can exceed baseline IOPS and throughput for short periods, but sustained high loads will throttle back to baseline levels. Baseline throughput for Nano is just 5 MB/s, while Micro and Small offer 11-22 MB/s. For consistent performance, Supabase recommends upgrading to Large (79 MB/s baseline) or higher .

Disk type also matters. General Purpose gp3 disks are the default and include 3,000 IOPS and 125 MB/s throughput at no additional cost. You can provision additional IOPS at $0.024 per IOPS and throughput at $0.95 per MB/s, up to compute limits. For example, a Medium instance supports up to 11,800 IOPS burst but only 2,000 IOPS baseline. High-performance io2 disks cost $0.195 per GB and $0.119 per IOPS, but they automatically scale throughput with IOPS and support up to 80,000 IOPS for latency-sensitive workloads .

Most applications will be perfectly fine with gp3 disks. The Dashboard provides a "Disk IO % consumed" metric that shows when you're exceeding baseline performance. If this metric consistently exceeds 1%, consider upgrading compute size. If it hits 100%, your workload is fully saturating available disk I/O, and an upgrade is strongly recommended to prevent performance degradation.

FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions About Supabase Pricing

Is Supabase really free?

Yes, Supabase offers a permanent free tier with 500 MB database storage, 1 GB file storage, 50,000 MAUs, and unlimited API requests. Free projects pause after 7 days of inactivity, but there's no time limit on how long you can use the free plan. This makes it ideal for learning, prototyping, and even small production apps .

What happens when I exceed free tier limits?

If you exceed free tier limits, Supabase doesn't automatically charge you. Instead, certain features may be throttled or paused. For example, exceeding 500 MB database storage will prevent further writes until you delete data or upgrade. To continue growing, you must upgrade to a paid plan (Pro starts at $25/month) which includes higher quotas and usage-based overage pricing .

How do compute credits work on the Pro plan?

Each Pro or Team organization receives $10 in monthly compute credits. These credits apply only to compute costs (the dedicated Postgres instance hours). For a single project on Micro compute (~$10/month), the credit covers 100% of compute. For a project on Small compute (~$15/month), the credit reduces compute cost to $5. Credits reset monthly and do not roll over .

Can I run multiple projects on one Supabase plan?

Yes, but all projects in an organization share the same plan (Free, Pro, Team, or Enterprise). Each additional project adds its own compute costs. For example, on Pro with two Micro compute projects, total monthly compute is $20 ($10 + $10), minus the $10 credit = $10 compute + $25 Pro fee = $35 total. To have some projects on Free and others on Pro, you must create separate organizations .

Does Supabase offer HIPAA compliance?

Yes, HIPAA compliance is available only on the Enterprise plan with custom pricing. Enterprise also includes SOC 2 Type II certification, private VPC deployment, regional replication, and point-in-time recovery. For healthcare applications requiring strict data protection, Supabase Enterprise is a viable option alongside specialized solutions like Xano .

How does Supabase pricing compare to Firebase?

Supabase is generally more cost-effective than Firebase, especially at scale. Firebase charges per read/write/delete operation and for bandwidth, while Supabase charges primarily for storage, compute hours, and egress with unlimited API requests. For apps with high read/write volume, Supabase can be significantly cheaper. Firebase also lacks native PostgreSQL support, favoring its proprietary NoSQL database .

Can I upgrade my compute size without downtime?

Compute size changes incur approximately 2 minutes of downtime while your Postgres instance migrates to new hardware. Supabase recommends scheduling upgrades during maintenance windows. Downtime can be longer depending on your cloud provider and database size. Compute sizes are not auto-upgraded; you must manually initiate changes from the Dashboard .

What's the maximum database size on Supabase?

With gp3 disks, maximum database size is 16 TB. With io2 high-performance disks, maximum is 60 TB. The largest compute instance (16XL) supports 256 GB RAM and 64 dedicated CPU cores, suitable for massive enterprise databases. For even larger requirements, contact Supabase sales for custom >16XL configurations .