Supabase Pricing: Cost, Pro Plan and Self Hosting▋

How much does Supabase cost?

Supabase costs $0 a month on Free, from $25 on Pro, from $599 on Team and a quoted figure on Enterprise. The word "from" is doing real work in those numbers, because the plan fee only buys quotas. The Postgres compute instance your project actually runs on is billed separately, from $10 a month for Micro up to $3,730 for 16XL, and paid plans include $10 of compute credits toward it.

In practice a small production project on Pro lands near $25 a month, because the $10 credit covers a Micro instance and the included quotas cover the rest. A busier project that needs a Medium instance is $25 plus $50 of uncovered compute, so $75 before a single gigabyte of overage. Once egress, database disk and monthly active users start running past their allowances, the meters below are what decide the rest of the invoice.

Is Supabase free?

Yes, Supabase has a genuinely free tier at $0 a month, and it is generous enough to build on: 50,000 monthly active users, a 500 MB database, 5 GB of egress, 5 GB of cached egress, 1 GB of file storage and unlimited API requests. You are allowed two free projects, and that limit applies across every organization where you are an Owner or Administrator.

The two catches are the ones that push people onto Pro. Free projects are paused after a period of inactivity, so a demo you show a client once a month will not be awake when you open it. And the allowances are small enough that one busy launch day can exhaust 5 GB of egress on its own. Supabase does note that paused projects stop counting toward your free project limit, which is useful if you are parking old work rather than running it.

How much does Supabase Pro cost?

Supabase Pro starts at $25 a month per organization and includes $10 a month of compute credits, 100,000 monthly active users, 8 GB of database disk per project, 250 GB of egress, 250 GB of cached egress, 100 GB of file storage, 2 million edge function invocations, 500 concurrent realtime connections, 5 million realtime messages, 7 days of log retention and 7 days of automatic backups.

The number that surprises people is the compute ladder underneath it. The $10 credit covers a Micro instance and nothing more, so the real question is which instance your database needs. Small costs $5 above the credit. Medium costs $50 above it, a four times jump in one step, and that single click is the steepest increase on the whole rate card.

Because billing is per organization and plans cannot be mixed inside one, every project in a Pro organization runs its own compute instance while sharing one plan fee. Two production projects on Medium instances in the same organization is $25 plus $120 of compute, not $50 plus $120.

Why is Supabase so expensive?

Supabase feels expensive because the headline is $25 and the invoice is rarely $25. Three lines do most of the damage: the compute instance sits outside the plan fee, monthly active users bill at $0.00325 each past 100,000, and egress bills at $0.09 per GB past 250 GB. None of those are unreasonable rates on their own, but they are all invisible on the pricing card that made you choose the plan.

The structural version of the same complaint is the per organization billing model. You cannot keep a Free staging project alongside a Pro production project inside one organization, so teams split them into separate organizations and pay the plan fee twice, or consolidate and put staging on production infrastructure. Both options cost something. Agencies feel this hardest, because client isolation and a single invoice are mutually exclusive.

It is worth being fair about what the money buys. Managed Postgres with auth, storage, realtime and edge functions wired together, backed up daily and upgraded without you, is a real product and building it yourself is not free either. The question is whether your particular bill is dominated by things a managed platform does well, or by egress and compute, which a server you rent does just as well for less.

Can I self host Supabase?

Yes. Supabase is open source and ships a Docker Compose stack you can run on your own server, and the documentation publishes the hardware it expects. The stack runs Studio, an Envoy API gateway, Auth, PostgREST, Realtime, Storage, imgproxy, postgres-meta, Postgres itself, the Edge Runtime and the Supavisor connection pooler, with Logflare and Vector as optional analytics and log collection containers.

Supabase notes that you can cut the requirement further by deleting services you do not use: if you do not need Realtime, Storage, imgproxy or the Edge Runtime, those sections can come out of the compose file. It also warns that a secure password must be set before you start the stack, that the default configuration does not include Logs and Analytics, and that production deployments need HTTPS with a valid TLS certificate, especially if you use OAuth providers.

That last requirement is the one people underestimate. Running the containers is an afternoon. Keeping a certificate renewed, a firewall closed, backups tested, Postgres patched and the stack upgraded without downtime is the ongoing job, and it is the job a server management panel exists to do. Provisioning the box, wiring the TLS certificate, scheduling the backup and deploying updates with zero downtime releases is exactly the work DeployManage automates.

How much does Supabase storage cost?

File storage on Supabase is $0.0213 per GB per month above the included allowance, which is 100 GB on Pro and Team and 1 GB on Free. At that rate, a terabyte of stored files is about $21 a month, which is cheap and almost never the line that hurts.

The line that hurts is the egress attached to it. Every file a user downloads is billed again at $0.09 per GB of egress, or $0.03 per GB if it is served from cache. Storing 100 GB of product images costs about $2 a month; serving those images to real traffic can cost twenty times that. If your storage bill looks fine and your invoice does not, check the egress meter rather than the storage meter, and put a CDN in front of anything users download repeatedly.

Why is Supabase pausing my project?

Free plan projects are paused after a period of inactivity. That is a deliberate part of the Free tier rather than a fault, and the fix is either to open the project again or to move the organization onto a paid plan, where projects are not paused. Supabase does not publish the exact inactivity window on its billing page, so treat any specific number you read elsewhere as unverified.

One detail is genuinely useful: paused projects do not count toward your two project limit on Free. If you are parking finished work rather than running it, letting those projects pause is the intended behaviour and it frees capacity for something new. If the project needs to answer a request at any hour, though, pausing is the single most common reason people move to Pro, and $25 a month for a database that stays awake is a fair trade.

What does Supabase cost against running Postgres on your own server?

Supabase publishes both halves of this comparison itself, which makes it unusually easy to do honestly. Its managed compute instances are $10 to $3,730 a month, and its self hosting documentation says the Docker stack wants 4 GB of RAM, 2 cores and 40 GB of SSD at minimum, or 8 GB, 4 cores and 80 GB or more to be comfortable. Those specs map onto ordinary cloud servers at published prices.

Read that table as a trade rather than a win. Self hosting is cheaper on compute and dramatically cheaper on egress, because a droplet ships with terabytes of transfer included while Supabase bills $0.09 per GB past 250 GB. It is more expensive in attention: backups, point in time recovery, Postgres upgrades, TLS renewal and OS patching all become yours, and none of them are hard until the night they fail.

The honest rule of thumb is that Supabase wins when your bill is small and your team is small, because $25 a month buys engineering time you do not have to spend. Your own server wins when the bill is dominated by egress and compute rather than by convenience, when you need the data on infrastructure you control, or when you are running many client backends and the per organization model has stopped making sense. If you land on the second side of that line, the work is provisioning a server, hardening it, and deploying to it repeatably, which is what managed VPS tooling and a git based deployment pipeline are for. Teams weighing the same question about their front end usually read our Vercel pricing and Netlify pricing breakdowns next.