Supabase pricing has four plans: Free at $0, Pro at $25 per month, Team at $599 per month, and Enterprise with custom pricing. Paid plans include a $10 monthly compute credit, and extra usage like storage, bandwidth, and bigger compute is billed on top. Most early stage apps run at a flat $25 per month on Pro, while growing production apps typically land between $35 and $200 depending on traffic and compute size.
That is the summary. The details matter though, because Supabase bills in a way that surprises people who skip the fine print. This guide explains every plan, the credit system, and what real monthly bills look like, in plain English. We build client applications on backends like Supabase, so this comes from working with these bills, not just reading the pricing page.
What Is Supabase?
Supabase is a backend as a service built on Postgres, the popular open source database. One subscription bundles your database, user authentication, file storage, serverless edge functions, and realtime features. That bundling matters for pricing: comparing Supabase to a plain database host is misleading, because you would need three or four separate services to replace it.
Supabase Plans at a Glance
| Plan | Price | Best For |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Learning, prototypes, and hobby projects |
| Pro | $25 per month | Production apps, the standard choice |
| Team | $599 per month | Companies needing compliance and SSO |
| Enterprise | Custom | Large scale, HIPAA, and custom contracts |
For current exact numbers, always confirm on the official Supabase pricing page, since quotas get adjusted over time.
What Does the Free Plan Include, and Where Is the Catch?
The free tier is genuinely generous: a 500 MB database, 1 GB file storage, 5 GB bandwidth, 50,000 monthly active users for authentication, 500,000 edge function calls, and up to 2 active projects.
The catch is not a quota. It is the pause rule. Free projects automatically pause after 7 days without activity, which makes the free plan unusable for anything real users depend on. There are also no backups and no uptime guarantee. So the free plan is perfect for building and testing, and wrong for production.
How Does Pro Plan Billing Actually Work?
This is the section that saves you from surprise bills. The Pro plan has three moving parts:
1. The $25 base. This buys the bundle with raised quotas: an 8 GB database, 100 GB file storage, 100,000 monthly active users, and daily backups.
2. The $10 compute credit. Every Supabase project runs on its own dedicated Postgres server, and you pay for that server’s size. Paid plans include $10 of monthly credit, which exactly covers the smallest instance, called Micro with 1 GB of RAM. So if your app fits on Micro, compute costs you nothing extra. Bigger instances cost the difference: Small at $15 means $5 extra, Medium at $60 means $50 extra, Large at $110 means $100 extra, and the ladder climbs all the way to a 16XL monster at $3,730 for 256 GB of RAM.
3. Usage overages. Going past your included storage or bandwidth is billed per unit, with bandwidth at roughly $0.09 per GB. Helpfully, Pro ships with a spend cap turned on by default, so your project throttles instead of silently running up a giant bill. You switch the cap off only when you deliberately want to scale past quotas.
Two facts trip people up most. First, compute bills 24 hours a day. Unlike serverless databases such as Neon, a Pro project never scales to zero, so you pay for your instance even at 3 am with zero visitors. Second, pricing is per project. Two production projects means two compute instances, so consolidating small apps into one project can save real money.
What Do Real Monthly Bills Look Like?
Sticker price and reality differ, so here are typical scenarios based on published rates:
- New app, small user base: $25 flat. The compute credit covers Micro, and quotas absorb everything else. Most early apps genuinely stay here.
- Growing app on Small compute with 20 GB storage and 300 GB bandwidth: around $36 per month.
- A SaaS with tens of thousands of active users: commonly $100 to $200 per month once compute upgrades and bandwidth stack up.
- Heavy production workloads: compute becomes the dominant line, and bills can reach hundreds or thousands, which is the point where teams start comparing self hosting.
For context, community reports put the median Supabase contract at around $1,000 per year, which tells you most paying customers are in the modest Pro plus add ons range, not the Team tier.
What About the Team and Enterprise Plans?
The jump from $25 to $599 buys compliance, not performance. Team adds SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certifications, SSO, longer 14 day backup retention, and priority support. If your customers are enterprises that demand security certifications, this tier pays for itself in closed deals. If not, Pro handles almost every production case.
Enterprise is custom priced and adds HIPAA compliance for healthcare data, dedicated support, and bring your own cloud options.
The Hidden Costs Worth Knowing
Beyond the plan price, watch for these based on common user complaints:
- Bandwidth creep. Apps serving lots of images or files hit egress charges faster than expected. Caching and image optimization directly cut this line.
- Image transformations. Supabase’s built in image resizing is priced steeply, so heavy image apps often handle transformations elsewhere.
- Compute jumps. Each compute tier roughly doubles in price, so growth happens in steps, not a smooth line.
- Per project multiplication. Staging and preview environments each carry their own compute if not managed carefully.
Is Supabase Good for AI Applications?
Here is an angle most pricing guides ignore. Supabase includes pgvector at no extra charge, which is the Postgres extension for storing embeddings, the numerical fingerprints AI models use to search by meaning. That means you can build AI features like semantic search, recommendation systems, and chatbots with memory on a $25 plan, where dedicated vector databases would bill you separately.
In our client work, this makes Supabase one of the most cost efficient backends for AI powered products at the early stage: one bill covers your database, auth, storage, and vector search. If you are planning an AI product and want the architecture and costs mapped before you build, that is exactly what we do through AI consulting and strategy, and we build on stacks like this in our custom AI development work. Dev tool pricing shifts constantly, and we track it: see our breakdown of OpenAI Codex pricing for the AI coding side of a modern stack.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does Supabase cost per month?
Free for hobby projects, $25 per month for the Pro plan most production apps use, and $599 per month for the Team plan with compliance features. Real Pro bills range from a flat $25 for small apps to a few hundred dollars for busy ones, driven mainly by compute size and bandwidth.
Is the Supabase free tier enough for a real app?
It is enough to build and validate one, with a 500 MB database and 50,000 monthly auth users. But free projects pause after 7 days of inactivity and have no backups, so anything with real users belongs on Pro.
What is the $10 compute credit?
Every paid plan includes $10 per month toward your project’s dedicated server. It fully covers the smallest Micro instance, so many apps pay nothing extra for compute. Larger instances cost the difference between their price and the credit.
Does Supabase charge when my app is idle?
On paid plans, yes. Your compute instance runs and bills 24/7 regardless of traffic. If your workload is idle most of the time, serverless alternatives like Neon that scale to zero can be cheaper.
Is Supabase cheaper than Firebase?
Often, yes, especially for read heavy apps at mid scale, where independent comparisons put Supabase meaningfully cheaper. Supabase also bills by resources rather than per operation, which many teams find easier to predict. The honest answer depends on your usage pattern, so model both before migrating.
