Firebase Pricing: Cost, Firestore and Blaze Plan▋

How much does Firebase cost?

Firebase costs $0 a month on the Spark plan and $0 a month in plan fees on the Blaze plan, because Blaze is pay as you go and has no subscription at all. What you pay on Blaze is usage above the free allowance, which Blaze carries over from Spark in full. An app on Blaze that stays inside the free limits genuinely bills nothing.

That structure is why the question is hard to answer with one number. There is no seat price, no tier to outgrow and no annual commitment. The invoice is the sum of six or seven metered lines, and the two that dominate for most teams are Firestore operations and Cloud Functions compute. A small production app typically lands somewhere between $0 and $25 a month. An app with an inefficient read pattern can land in the hundreds on the same amount of traffic, which is the part that makes Firebase costs feel unpredictable.

Google also gives eligible new accounts $300 in free credit, which masks the real run rate for the first few months. Check what your usage looks like once that credit is gone rather than budgeting from your first invoice.

Is Firebase free?

Yes, Firebase has a free tier that does not expire and does not require a payment method. The Spark plan costs $0 and includes 50,000 Firestore document reads a day, 20,000 writes, 20,000 deletes, 1 GiB of stored data, 10 GiB of monthly egress, 10 GB of Hosting storage and 360 MB of daily Hosting transfer.

Several Firebase products are free on both plans with no usage cap worth worrying about: Cloud Messaging, Google Analytics, Crashlytics, Performance Monitoring, A/B Testing, App Distribution, In-App Messaging and Remote Config. Authentication with standard providers such as email, Google and Apple is also free.

The honest limitation is Cloud Functions. Spark does not include it, and it does not include any paid Google Cloud service either. Since most applications need server side logic eventually, the free plan tends to end for architectural reasons rather than because a project got popular. When it does, note that moving to Blaze does not cost anything on its own.

What is the Firebase Blaze plan?

Blaze is Firebase's pay as you go plan: no monthly fee, the full Spark free tier included, and metered charges for anything above it. Upgrading to Blaze requires a billing account but does not create a bill by itself.

Blaze changes three things. It unlocks Cloud Functions and the paid Google Cloud products behind Firebase, it raises several ceilings (Realtime Database goes from 100 simultaneous connections to 200,000 per database instance), and it removes the quota wall. On Spark, an app that exceeds its allowance stops serving until the quota resets at midnight. On Blaze, it keeps serving and keeps billing.

That last difference is the whole risk profile of the plan. Spark fails closed and Blaze fails open. Teams who care more about a predictable invoice than about staying online through a spike often find that neither option is what they wanted, which is the reason a fixed monthly server keeps coming up in this comparison.

How much does Firestore cost per read?

Firestore costs $0.03 per 100,000 document reads in us-central1, after a free allowance of 50,000 reads a day. Writes are $0.09 per 100,000, deletes are $0.01 per 100,000, and TTL deletes are billed at the delete rate.

The unit matters more than the rate. Firestore bills per document returned, not per query issued, so cost scales with how much data your screens pull rather than how often users tap. A dashboard that loads a 500 document collection on every visit costs 500 reads per visit. The same dashboard backed by a single pre-aggregated summary document costs one.

Storage is quoted hourly at $0.000205479 per GiB, which is roughly $0.15 per GiB a month over a 730 hour month, with the first 1 GiB free. Point in time recovery data bills at that same rate, so enabling PITR approximately doubles the storage line. Backups are cheaper at $0.000041096 per GiB hour, about $0.03 per GiB a month, while restore and clone operations cost $0.20 per GiB each.

One detail almost no third-party page mentions: Firestore operations are eligible for committed use discounts. A one year commitment cuts reads to $0.024 and writes to $0.072 per 100,000, and a three year commitment takes them to $0.018 and $0.054. If your read volume is steady, that is a 20 to 40 percent reduction on the largest line of the bill.

Why is my Firebase bill so high?

Almost always because of read volume, not price changes. Firebase rates are low per operation, so a large bill means a very large number of operations, and that usually traces to one of a handful of code patterns rather than to growth in users.

The four that account for most surprise invoices:

• Collection reads where a document would do. Fetching a whole collection to count it or to show a summary bills one read per document. Maintain a counter instead.
• Listeners that never detach. A real-time listener left attached when a screen unmounts keeps billing for every change to the data it watches, for as long as the app is open.
• Functions that trigger on their own writes. A Firestore trigger that writes back to the collection it watches will invoke itself. This can run until you notice.
• Missing indexes and over-wide queries. Pulling 1,000 documents to filter them client side bills all 1,000, even if you display three.

Enable the Firestore usage view in the console and look at reads per day before assuming the pricing model is at fault. If reads per active user are in the thousands, the query shape is the problem and no platform change will fix it. If reads per user are reasonable and the bill is still uncomfortable, then the pricing model genuinely does not fit your workload.

How do I set a spending limit on Firebase?

Firebase does not offer a hard spending cap. Cloud Billing budgets let you set a monthly threshold and receive an alert at chosen percentages of it, but an alert is a notification, not a brake. Usage continues and billing continues after it fires.

The documented way to build an actual limit is to route the budget alert to a Pub/Sub topic and subscribe a Cloud Function that calls the Cloud Billing API to disable billing on the project. That works, and it is genuinely what Google recommends, but it is worth being clear about what it means: you are writing and maintaining a small piece of infrastructure whose job is to switch your product off, and when it fires your application stops rather than degrades.

For a lot of teams that trade is the deciding factor. A fixed monthly server has a spending limit by construction, because the invoice is the same whether you serve one request or a million. You trade elastic scale for a number you already know, and for a steady workload that is usually the better trade.

How much does Firebase Hosting cost?

Firebase Hosting is free up to 10 GB of storage and 360 MB of data transfer a day, then $0.026 per GB stored and $0.15 per GB transferred. Custom domains and SSL certificates are included on both Spark and Blaze at no charge, and you can host multiple sites in one project.

The daily transfer allowance is the constraint worth planning around, because it does not roll over. Ten quiet days do not bank capacity for a busy one. In practical terms 360 MB is around 180 page loads of a 2 MB page, which a modest launch day passes easily.

Firebase App Hosting, the newer product for server rendered apps, is priced separately: outgoing bandwidth is free to 10 GiB a month and then $0.20 per GiB uncached or $0.15 per GiB cached, with storage free to 5 GB and $0.10 per GB after that. If you are comparing static hosting costs across platforms, our Netlify pricing breakdown and Vercel pricing breakdown use the same first-party method on the two most common alternatives.

How much does Firebase Authentication cost?

Firebase Authentication is free for standard sign in methods, and free up to 50,000 monthly active users once Identity Platform is enabled. Email and password, Google, Apple, Facebook and the other common providers cost nothing regardless of user count on the classic Authentication product.

Two things are billed. Above 50,000 monthly active users, Identity Platform falls back to Google Cloud rates. And SAML or OIDC federation, the enterprise single sign on path, is free only up to 50 monthly active users, which is a far lower threshold than the headline 50,000 and catches teams selling into enterprises earlier than they expect.

Phone authentication is the line that costs real money. It is billed per SMS sent, and because carrier rates differ enormously by country Google publishes no single figure. We are not going to quote one either, since any number we invented would be wrong for most readers. If phone sign in is central to your product, price it against your actual user geography before committing, and treat it as a per-message cost rather than a platform cost.

Firebase pricing compared to running your own server

The honest comparison is not feature for feature, because Firebase gives you managed authentication, a real-time database, push messaging and analytics in one console and a bare server gives you none of that. What a server gives you instead is a fixed number.

Read that table in both directions. If your traffic is genuinely spiky or you are pre-launch, scale to zero is worth real money and Firebase wins. If your traffic is steady, you are paying a per-operation premium every month for elasticity you are not using, and a $12 droplet running Postgres will handle a workload that costs considerably more in Firestore reads.

The reason teams stay on metered platforms past that crossover is usually not price, it is that nobody wants to own server setup, TLS renewal, deploys and rollbacks. That is the specific job DeployManage does: it provisions the server on your own cloud account, configures nginx, PHP or Node, databases and certificates, and deploys from git with atomic zero downtime releases. You get the fixed invoice without taking on the sysadmin work that normally comes with it. If you are weighing the same decision against a Postgres backend specifically, our Supabase pricing breakdown covers the closest open source alternative to Firebase, including what self hosting it actually requires.