This article contains affiliate links. We may earn a commission if you purchase through them, at no extra cost to you.
You’re building something real on Supabase and you’ve hit the point where you need to decide: stay on the free tier and hope for the best, or pull out the credit card? Or maybe you’re evaluating Supabase before you start and you want to know exactly where the walls are before you commit. Either way, you’re in the right place.
Supabase has been on a pricing evolution since 2024, and 2026 brought another round of changes — most notably to how compute is billed, how pausing works on the free tier, and what’s included in the Pro plan. The official docs are… fine, but they’re written to sell you something. This breakdown is written to help you actually decide.
TL;DR — Quick Verdict
- Hobby project / proof of concept: Free tier is fine, but read the pausing rules first.
- Production app with real users: Pro ($25/mo) — non-negotiable. The free tier will pause your database.
- Startup with a team and compliance needs: Team ($599/mo) — expensive but includes SOC 2 coverage and no shared responsibility headaches.
- Enterprise: Custom pricing, dedicated infrastructure, SLAs. Call their sales team.
Bottom line: Supabase’s free tier is genuinely generous for learning and side projects. But the jump from Free to Pro is where 90% of developers need to pay close attention — because the limits are easy to hit without realizing it.
What Changed in Supabase Pricing for 2026
Before we get into the tiers, here’s what actually changed recently so you’re not reading outdated information:
- Compute is now billed by compute hours, not instance size alone. You’re charged for the time your database compute is running, which matters a lot if you’re spinning up multiple projects.
- Free tier pausing behavior tightened. Projects on the free tier that have no activity for 7 days get paused. Previously this was more lenient. If you’re running a low-traffic internal tool, this will bite you.
- Storage pricing was restructured. The old “5GB included” model shifted to a more granular per-GB overage model across tiers.
- The Team plan got a clearer identity. It used to feel like a bloated Pro plan. Now it’s positioned specifically for teams that need SSO, audit logs, and compliance tooling.
- Edge Functions invocation limits were adjusted upward on Pro — a welcome change for anyone doing serverless-heavy architectures.
Now let’s go through each tier properly.
Supabase Free Tier — What You Actually Get
Price: $0/month
The free tier is legitimately good for getting started. Here’s what’s included per project:
- 500MB database storage
- 5GB bandwidth
- 50,000 monthly active users (Auth)
- 1GB file storage (Storage bucket)
- 500K Edge Function invocations/month
- 200 concurrent Realtime connections
- Shared compute (the smallest available instance)
- Community support only
The catch everyone misses: Free projects are paused after 7 days of inactivity. And “inactivity” is defined by Supabase, not you. A project that’s receiving occasional background pings might still get paused. When a paused project gets a request, it takes 20–30 seconds to wake up. For a demo link you’re sharing with a potential investor, that is a disaster.
You can have up to 2 free projects per organization. That’s actually useful — one for dev, one for a small side project. But don’t try to run a production app here. The shared compute means your query performance is unpredictable, and the pausing behavior alone disqualifies it for anything user-facing.
Free tier is right for you if: You’re learning Postgres, prototyping an idea, building a hackathon project, or evaluating Supabase before committing. It’s also fine for internal tools where a 30-second cold start is acceptable.
Get the dev tool stack guide
A weekly breakdown of the tools worth your time — and the ones that aren’t. Join 500+ developers.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Supabase Pro Tier — The Real Starting Point for Production
Price: $25/month per project (base)
This is where most indie developers and small teams should live. The $25 base gets you:
- 8GB database storage (then $0.125/GB)
- 250GB bandwidth (then $0.09/GB)
- 100,000 monthly active users (Auth)
- 100GB file storage (then $0.021/GB)
- 2M Edge Function invocations/month
- 500 concurrent Realtime connections
- No project pausing — your database stays awake
- 7-day log retention
- Email support
- Daily backups (7-day retention)
- Compute credits: $10/month included
That last point about compute credits is important. Supabase now bills compute separately from the base plan price. The $10 compute credit covers the smallest dedicated compute instance (2-core shared CPU, 1GB RAM). If you need more performance — say, a 4-core dedicated instance — you’ll pay the difference on top of the $25.
For most apps under serious but not massive load, the included compute is fine. I’ve run a SaaS with ~2,000 daily active users on it without issues. Where you’ll feel the limits is if you have complex queries, lots of joins, or you’re doing heavy real-time subscriptions.
The honest math: A typical Pro project running a standard compute instance, moderate storage, and reasonable bandwidth will cost you $25–$45/month. That’s genuinely competitive with alternatives. Firebase can get expensive fast once you’re out of Spark plan territory, and rolling your own Postgres on a VPS (check out our best cloud hosting for side projects guide for comparison) adds operational overhead that $25/month easily justifies avoiding.
Pro tier is right for you if: You have a real production app, paying customers, or any situation where database downtime or pausing is unacceptable. This is the minimum viable tier for anything you care about.
Supabase Team Tier — For Actual Teams
Price: $599/month (covers your entire organization)
This is a big jump and it’s intentional. The Team plan isn’t for solo developers or even two-person startups. It’s for companies with compliance requirements, multiple engineers who need access controls, and situations where you need Supabase to be a serious vendor relationship rather than a utility bill.
What you get on top of Pro:
- SOC 2 compliance coverage — Supabase is SOC 2 Type II certified, and the Team plan is what gets you the documentation you need for your own audits
- SSO for your Supabase dashboard — manage team access through your identity provider
- Audit logs — see who did what in your project
- Priority support with faster response times
- Custom SMTP — use your own email provider for auth emails
- Advanced roles and permissions
- 28-day log retention (vs 7 days on Pro)
- Daily backups with 28-day retention
The $599/month covers your whole organization, not per project. If you have 5 production projects, you’re paying $599 total, not $599 × 5. That changes the math significantly once you’re past 3–4 projects.
Is it worth it? If you’re selling to enterprise customers who ask about SOC 2 compliance in their security questionnaires, yes. If you have a dev team of 4+ people and someone accidentally deleted a production table last month, yes. If you’re a solo developer or a two-person startup that’s not dealing with compliance requirements yet, no — stay on Pro and upgrade when the need is concrete.
Team tier is right for you if: You’re a funded startup with compliance requirements, you have 5+ engineers touching production infrastructure, or you’re selling to customers who will ask about your security posture.
Supabase Enterprise — Custom Everything
Price: Custom (contact sales)
Enterprise gives you dedicated infrastructure, custom SLAs (including uptime guarantees), bring-your-own-cloud options, enterprise support contracts, and custom data residency. If you’re at the scale where you’re considering Enterprise, you already know what you need and you’re talking to their sales team anyway. I won’t waste your time here.
One thing worth knowing: Supabase does offer self-hosted options. You can run the full Supabase stack on your own infrastructure. It’s genuinely viable and the docs are solid. If you’re going down that path, pair it with reliable cloud infrastructure — DigitalOcean is a reasonable choice for managed Postgres + Droplets if you want more control over your stack without full enterprise pricing.
Supabase Pricing Comparison Table
| Feature | Free | Pro | Team | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $0 | $25/project/mo | $599/org/mo | Custom |
| DB Storage | 500MB | 8GB | 8GB+ | Custom |
| Bandwidth | 5GB | 250GB | 250GB+ | Custom |
| Monthly Active Users | 50K | 100K | 100K+ | Custom |
| Project Pausing | Yes (7 days) | No | No | No |
| Daily Backups | No | 7-day retention | 28-day retention | Custom |
| Log Retention | 1 day | 7 days | 28 days | Custom |
| SOC 2 Compliance Docs | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| SSO (Dashboard) | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Support | Community | Priority Email | Dedicated | |
| Edge Function Invocations | 500K/mo | 2M/mo | 2M+/mo | Custom |
The Hidden Costs Nobody Mentions
Supabase’s base pricing is clear. The overage costs are where people get surprised. Here’s what to watch:
Compute Add-ons
The default compute on Pro is fine for most apps, but if you’re doing anything with heavy concurrent connections or complex queries, you’ll want to upgrade your compute instance. Prices range from the included micro instance up to large dedicated instances at $200+/month. Check the compute add-ons page on Supabase’s site before you assume $25/month is your total cost.
Read Replicas
Read replicas are billed separately per replica. If you’re scaling a read-heavy app, this adds up. Each replica is essentially another compute instance charge.
Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR)
PITR is an add-on even on Pro. If you need the ability to restore to any specific point in time (not just daily snapshots), you pay extra. For financial apps or anything where data integrity is critical, budget for this.
Auth MAU Overages
100K MAU sounds like a lot until you have a viral moment. Overage is charged per MAU above the limit. Not ruinously expensive, but worth knowing it’s metered.
Supabase vs. The Alternatives — Is It Worth It?
The honest comparison:
- Firebase: Generous free tier but Firestore’s document model is limiting for complex queries. Supabase wins on SQL flexibility. Firebase wins on mobile SDKs and Google ecosystem integration.
- PlanetScale: MySQL-based, excellent for horizontal scaling. Supabase wins on the full-stack BaaS features (Auth, Storage, Realtime). PlanetScale wins if you specifically need a MySQL-compatible database with branching.
- Neon: Serverless Postgres, very competitive pricing, excellent branching for dev workflows. Doesn’t include Auth, Storage, or Realtime out of the box. Supabase wins on completeness.
- Self-hosted Postgres: Cheapest at scale, most control. Loses on developer experience, setup time, and ongoing maintenance. If you’re migrating away from a managed BaaS to self-hosted infrastructure, our article on migrating 14 projects from Heroku to Railway is a realistic preview of what that effort looks like.
Real-World Scenarios: Which Tier to Pick
Scenario 1: Solo developer, side project, 50–200 users
Start on Free, upgrade to Pro the moment you have real users who’d notice a 30-second cold start. At $25/month, it’s less than your Spotify subscription. Do it.
Scenario 2: SaaS startup, 500–5,000 users, 2-person team
Pro tier, probably $35–50/month all-in with a slightly upgraded compute instance. This is the sweet spot. You don’t need Team tier yet unless a customer is asking for your SOC 2 report.
Scenario 3: B2B SaaS selling to enterprise customers
Team tier at $599/month. The compliance documentation alone is worth it — one enterprise deal will pay for years of Team plan. Your alternative is spending engineering time building compliance documentation from scratch, which costs far more.
Scenario 4: Internal tool for a 10-person company
Pro tier. The free tier’s pausing behavior will cause an incident at 9am on a Monday. Just pay the $25.
Scenario 5: Developer building AI-powered apps
Supabase’s pgvector support makes it genuinely useful for AI applications. Pro tier gives you the compute you need for vector similarity searches. Pair it with the right AI tooling — we’ve covered the best options in our AI tools that save developers time roundup.
How to Reduce Your Supabase Bill
A few practical tips before you hit upgrade:
- Consolidate projects into one database using schemas. Instead of 3 free projects, run 3 logical apps in one Pro project using separate Postgres schemas. You save $50/month and manage one connection pool.
- Enable connection pooling (PgBouncer). It’s free and reduces compute load significantly for apps with many short-lived connections.
- Watch your storage tier carefully. Storing large files in Supabase Storage is convenient but not the cheapest option at scale. For high-volume file storage, consider offloading to S3-compatible storage directly.
- Set up billing alerts. Supabase lets you set spend caps. Use them. An unexpected traffic spike or a runaway Edge Function can turn a $25 bill into a $200 bill without a cap in place.
Final Recommendation
Supabase’s pricing is fair for what you get. The free tier is one of the more generous in the BaaS space — just treat it as what it is: a development and evaluation environment, not a production platform.
Here’s the simple decision tree:
- Building something real that people use → Pro, $25/month, done.
- Team of 3+ with compliance needs → Team, $599/month, worth every dollar if you’re selling B2B.
- Just learning or prototyping → Free, but set a calendar reminder to upgrade before you launch.
The worst outcome is running a real app on the free tier, having your database pause mid-demo, and losing a customer over it. The $25/month Pro plan is one of the easiest “just pay for it” decisions in the developer tools space.
If you’re evaluating your broader infrastructure stack alongside Supabase, our best cloud hosting for side projects guide covers what to run your frontend and other services on, and our DigitalOcean vs Hetzner vs Vultr comparison is worth reading if you’re considering self-hosting any part of your stack.
Get the dev tool stack guide
A weekly breakdown of the tools worth your time — and the ones that aren’t. Join 500+ developers.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.