Introduction
Supabase is the open-source Postgres backend that ate Firebase's lunch for developers who wanted SQL instead of a proprietary document store. But the pricing page hides as much as it reveals — the $0 to $25 jump is easy, the $25 to $599 jump is the one that catches growing startups off guard.
This guide walks through every tier, what each one actually buys you, where the overage meter starts ticking, and how Supabase compares to the alternatives in 2026.
Pricing Tiers Table
| Plan | Price | Database | Storage | MAU | Edge Invocations | Backups |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0/mo | 500 MB | 1 GB | 50,000 | 500K | None |
| Pro | $25/mo | 8 GB included | 100 GB included | 100,000 | 2M | Daily, 7-day |
| Team | $599/mo | 8 GB included | 100 GB included | 100,000 | 2M | Daily, 14-day |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Custom | Custom | Custom | PITR add-on |
What Each Tier Gets You
Free ($0/mo)
The Free tier is genuinely generous for prototyping. You get a real Postgres database (not a stripped-down sandbox), pgvector for embeddings, Row Level Security, the auth stack with 20+ social providers, and edge functions. Two projects per organization, two organizations per account.
The catch most people learn the hard way: free projects pause after 7 days of inactivity. You can unpause with one click, but if your side project gets a traffic spike on day 8, your users hit a paused project until you log in. There's no warning email that's loud enough to matter.
Pro ($25/mo per org)
The Pro plan is where Supabase becomes a real production backend. The headline upgrades:
- No project pausing — your app stays online
- 8 GB database and 100 GB storage included, with metered overages
- Daily backups with 7-day retention
- Email support (real humans, 1-2 day response)
- Custom SMTP, custom domains, and log retention bumped to 7 days
The $25 is a flat compute credit covering one small instance plus the included quotas. Spin up a second project in the same org and you're still on $25, but the second project starts billing compute on top.
Team ($599/mo per org)
Team is the compliance tier. The technical limits are identical to Pro — same DB, same MAU, same edge invocations. What you're paying $574 more for:
- SOC2 Type 2 compliance
- HIPAA-eligible (with separate BAA add-on)
- SSO for the Supabase dashboard
- Priority support with an SLA
- 28-day log retention and 14-day backup retention
- Standardized security questionnaire (saves you weeks on enterprise sales)
Hidden Costs
The sticker price is not the bill. Watch these meters:
- Compute add-ons. The included Pro compute is a Small instance (2 vCPU shared, 1 GB RAM). Anything heavier — a Medium is ~$60/mo, a Large is ~$110/mo, an XL is ~$210/mo — stacks on top of the $25 base, per project.
- Database storage overage. $0.125/GB/month beyond the included 8 GB. A 50 GB database adds ~$5.25/mo.
- Egress. $0.09/GB beyond the 250 GB included on Pro. A viral file-heavy app can blow past this fast.
- MAU overage. $0.00325 per MAU beyond 100K. Cheap in absolute terms, but worth modeling if you're consumer-facing.
- Realtime messages. 5M included on Pro, then $2.50 per million.
- Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR). Not included at any tier — it's a $100/mo add-on starting at 7-day retention.
- Branching. Database branches for preview environments cost $0.32 per branch per day after the free quota.
A realistic Pro bill for a small SaaS with one Medium compute instance, 20 GB of data, and modest traffic lands closer to $90-120/mo than the headline $25.
How It Compares to Competitors
vs Firebase
Firebase has no flat monthly base — it's pure pay-as-you-go on Blaze. For very low traffic, Firebase is cheaper. For predictable mid-traffic apps, Supabase's flat Pro fee is easier to budget. The real differentiator is the database: Postgres with SQL vs Firestore's document model. If you need joins, aggregations, or vector search, Supabase wins on day one.
vs Neon
Neon is Postgres-only — no auth, storage, or edge functions. Its $19/mo Launch plan beats Supabase Pro on raw database cost, and its branching story is more polished. But you're assembling the rest of the stack yourself. Supabase is the all-in-one play; Neon is the pure database play.
vs PlanetScale
PlanetScale is MySQL (with Postgres in beta) and starts at $39/mo for the Scaler plan after killing its free tier in 2024. It's faster for high-throughput workloads but lacks the integrated auth, storage, and realtime that come free with Supabase.
vs Appwrite
Appwrite is the most direct open-source competitor — also Pro at $15/mo, also all-in-one. It uses MariaDB under the hood and has a smaller ecosystem. Supabase wins on Postgres power and pgvector for AI workloads; Appwrite wins on price and a more opinionated SDK.
Which Plan Should You Pick
- Building a prototype, side project, or MVP: Free. Accept the 7-day pause as a forcing function to ship something users actually open.
- Launched product, real users, revenue or fundraise: Pro. The day your free project pauses during a demo is the day you wish you'd upgraded last week.
- Selling to enterprises, handling PHI, or have a compliance team asking for SOC2: Team. The $574 premium pays for itself the first time you hand over a security questionnaire without scrambling.
- Multi-region, dedicated compute, custom SLA: Enterprise. Talk to sales.
Verdict
Supabase in 2026 is still the best value in backend-as-a-service for anyone who wants real SQL. The Free tier is the most generous in the category if you can live with project pausing. The Pro plan at $25/mo (plus realistic add-ons landing you at $90-120) is fair for production workloads.
The honest weakness is the Pro-to-Team chasm. There's no $99 or $199 tier for the startup that's outgrown Pro support but isn't selling to Fortune 500s yet. If you need SOC2 but can't justify $599, your options are to wait, self-host, or stitch compliance together independently.
For 90% of builders reading this: start on Free, upgrade to Pro the day you have paying customers, and don't touch Team until a buyer asks for the SOC2 report by name.