Supabase vs Firebase Pricing: Which Is Cheaper

Supabase vs Firebase pricing at a glance

The two platforms do not price the same way, which is why a straight comparison of plan fees is misleading. Firebase has no subscription: both plans cost $0 a month and everything you use is metered per operation. Supabase has a floor: Free at $0, Pro from $25 a month, Team from $599, and Enterprise on quote, billed per organization rather than per project.

The structural difference is the third and fourth rows. Firebase charges for every document you read and write. Supabase does not meter queries at all, because you are renting a Postgres instance and what you pay for is the size of that instance. That single difference decides which platform is cheaper for you, and it depends entirely on how read-heavy your application is.

Which is cheaper, Supabase or Firebase?

Firebase is cheaper for small or spiky workloads, and Supabase is cheaper for steady read-heavy ones. The crossover usually arrives somewhere between 50 and 150 million Firestore reads a month, though the exact point depends on your write ratio and egress.

Here are three worked bills using rates read first-party on 1 September 2026. Firestore figures are the us-central1 rate card, and the Firebase free tier of 50,000 reads and 20,000 writes a day is deducted first.

A small SaaS: 5,000 users, 20 million reads, 3 million writes a month

Firebase bills 18.5 million chargeable reads at $0.03 per 100,000, which is $5.55, plus 2.4 million chargeable writes at $0.09 per 100,000, which is $2.16. Add roughly $1.20 for Cloud Functions invocations above the 2 million free, some GB seconds of compute, and about $1.38 of Hosting transfer. The invoice lands near $12 a month.

Supabase Pro is $25 a month, of which $10 of compute credit covers a Micro instance exactly, and 20 GB of egress sits well inside the 250 GB allowance.

Firebase wins this one, and it is not close in percentage terms. At this scale the metered model is doing what it is good at.

A read-heavy consumer app: 50,000 users, 400 million reads, 20 million writes

Firebase bills 398.5 million chargeable reads at $119.55 and 19.4 million chargeable writes at $17.46. Egress of 200 GB against a 360 MB daily Hosting allowance adds about $28. Before Cloud Functions compute the bill is already near $165 a month, and functions on a workload this size commonly add another $30 to $80.

Supabase at the same load needs a larger instance, so Pro at $25 plus a Large compute instance at $110 gives $135 a month, with 200 GB of egress still inside the included 250 GB. Reads and writes cost nothing extra no matter how many there are.

Supabase wins, and more importantly the number stops moving. The Firebase figure varies with every code change that alters query shape.

The same app, self hosted

Supabase is open source and free to run yourself. The published requirement is 4 GB of RAM, 2 cores and 40 GB of SSD as a minimum, with 8 GB, 4 cores and 80 GB recommended for production. On DigitalOcean that is a $24 droplet at minimum spec or a $48 droplet at the recommended one, with 4 to 5 TB of transfer included.

So the same workload that costs $165 on Firebase and $135 on Supabase Pro costs $48 in server rent, plus your time. That is the real spread, and it is why self hosting keeps coming up in this comparison rather than staying a hobbyist footnote.

Why is Firebase so expensive at scale?

Because Firestore bills per document returned rather than per query issued, so cost scales with how much data your screens pull. A list view that loads 200 documents costs 200 reads every time somebody opens it, whether or not the data changed.

That is a reasonable model, and per-operation rates are genuinely low. The problem is that the meter has no ceiling and no relationship to your revenue. Four patterns cause most of the pain: reading a whole collection to count it, real-time listeners that are never detached when a screen closes, Cloud Functions that trigger on writes to the collection they themselves write to, and wide queries that fetch a thousand rows to display three. None of those are exotic mistakes. They are ordinary code that happens to be expensive on this billing model.

Postgres, which is what Supabase runs, charges nothing for any of them. A badly shaped query on Postgres costs you latency and CPU on an instance you already paid for. The same query on Firestore costs you money that scales linearly with how often it runs. If you want the full Firebase rate card line by line, our Firebase pricing breakdown covers every meter with first-party figures.

Does Supabase have hidden costs?

Two that catch people. The first is that compute is billed separately from the plan fee. Pro is quoted as "from $25" because $25 buys quotas and $10 of compute credit, which covers a Micro instance only. The ladder runs Micro $10, Small $15, Medium $60, Large $110, XL $210 and upward to $3,730 for 16XL, and the step from Small to Medium quadruples the price in one click. Every project inside the organization runs its own instance and is billed separately.

The second is that Supabase bills per organization, not per project. Each organization carries its own plan, payment method and invoice, and plans cannot be mixed within one. Teams that split work across several organizations for access control reasons end up paying the Pro fee more than once.

Neither of those is unusual for infrastructure pricing, but both are floors rather than meters, which is the point. You can predict them at the start of the month. The Firebase equivalent is a number you learn at the end of it.

Should I migrate from Firebase to Supabase?

Migrate if your read volume is steady and growing, and stay if your traffic is genuinely spiky or you rely on Firebase products Supabase does not replace. The honest list of what you would give up is worth reading before you commit.

Firebase includes Crashlytics, Google Analytics, Cloud Messaging for push notifications, Remote Config, A/B Testing and App Distribution, all at no cost, and Supabase replaces none of them. If those are load bearing in your product you are not comparing two databases, you are comparing a database against a mobile platform, and the migration is much larger than a data move.

Where the two genuinely overlap, on the database, authentication, file storage and serverless functions, Supabase is a fair swap and Postgres is a more flexible query engine than Firestore. The migration work itself is mostly a schema exercise: Firestore documents are denormalized by design and Postgres expects tables, so the data model rarely maps one to one. Teams commonly stage this by running both systems briefly and using a pipeline to keep the two databases in sync while the cutover happens, rather than attempting a single big-bang export.

Then there is the third option most comparisons skip. If the reason you are leaving Firebase is a bill that moves on its own, self hosted Supabase on a server you control removes the meter entirely for the price of a droplet. The catch has always been that somebody has to provision the box, configure TLS, run the Docker stack, handle backups and deploy updates without dropping requests. That is the specific work DeployManage handles: it provisions the server on your own cloud account, sets up nginx and certificates, and deploys from git with atomic zero downtime releases.

Which should you pick for a new project?

If you are pre-launch and do not know your traffic shape, start on Firebase Spark or Supabase Free. Both are free, and guessing at the crossover before you have users is wasted effort.

If you already know the shape, the rule is simple. Bursty, unpredictable, or seasonal traffic favors Firebase, because scale to zero is worth real money and you pay nothing in quiet months. Steady traffic, especially read-heavy traffic like feeds, dashboards and catalogs, favors Supabase, because unmetered reads on a fixed instance beat per-read billing every time once volume is reliable.

And if your traffic is steady enough that you can name the instance size you need, price the self hosted option before you sign up for either. A $24 to $48 server with managed deployment often costs less than both, and it is the only one of the three where the invoice is identical every month.