Supabase Pricing Explained (Free Tier Limits)

The short definition

Supabase's pricing is a free tier plus two paid tiers, with the free tier capped at a 500 MB Postgres database, 1 GB of file storage, 5 GB of egress, and 50,000 monthly active users. Pro costs $25/mo and removes the free tier's biggest practical limitation — project pausing — while raising the included limits to 8 GB disk, 100 GB storage, and 250 GB egress, each with metered per-GB overage instead of a hard wall once you exceed them.

How it actually works

Every Supabase project starts on the free tier, and the limits are generous on some dimensions and tight on others. The 50,000 monthly active user allowance is far more headroom than most side projects or early-stage apps will use, but the 500 MB database limit fills up fast the moment you're storing real data rather than test records.

The most disruptive free-tier limit in practice isn't the 500 MB database cap — it's that free projects pause after 1 week of inactivity. That's a real problem for demos, portfolio projects, or anything with irregular traffic, since a visitor hitting a paused project sees a broken backend rather than a slow one. Pro removes pausing entirely, which alone is often the reason teams upgrade before they've come close to the storage or egress limits.

Because Supabase is built on standard Postgres rather than a proprietary database, none of these limits come with a query-language lock-in tax — you can connect any Postgres client or ORM regardless of tier. Overages past Pro's included limits are metered per GB rather than forcing a plan upgrade, so a project that occasionally spikes past 8 GB of disk or 250 GB of egress pays for the overage rather than getting throttled or bumped to Team.

When you need it — and when you do not

The free tier is genuinely usable for prototyping, learning, and any project where you can tolerate a week-long idle period without traffic — a hackathon project, a personal tool you use daily, or a demo you'll actively keep warm. Where it breaks down is exactly the scenario most side projects hit: infrequent but real visitors, where a paused project after a quiet week means the first visitor in a while sees a dead backend instead of your app.

Pro at $25/mo makes sense the moment pausing becomes a liability, which for most public-facing projects is immediately — even a low-traffic app that gets occasional organic visits needs to always be up. The included limits on Pro (8 GB disk, 100 GB storage, 250 GB egress, 100,000 MAUs) are enough headroom for most apps well past their early growth stage, and metered overage means you're not forced into Team just because you exceeded one dimension slightly.

Team's $599/mo only makes sense once you specifically need the team-collaboration controls it adds on top of Pro's identical resource limits — it isn't a bigger-resource tier, it's a bigger-organization tier. There's no middle option between $25 and $599, so a small team that's outgrown solo Pro usage but doesn't need formal team controls yet is stuck absorbing that jump or working around it.

The tools that do this

Supabase's core pitch is that the pricing sits on top of real Postgres, so nothing about the tier structure locks you into a proprietary data layer the way some backend-as-a-service platforms do. That matters most when comparing it against alternatives: Supabase vs Firebase covers the Postgres-vs-NoSQL tradeoff directly, and Supabase vs PlanetScale is worth reading if you're weighing Supabase against another Postgres-adjacent option for app backends.

If Supabase's pause-after-a-week free tier or the Pro-to-Team gap is a dealbreaker, it's worth checking how open-source alternatives handle the same tradeoffs — Appwrite vs Supabase compares two of the more prominent open-source options head to head, and best Firebase alternatives rounds up the open-source-first field more broadly. For most solo developers and small teams, though, the practical decision comes down to one thing: if you can tolerate free-tier pausing, stay free; the moment you can't, $25/mo for Pro is a small, predictable cost relative to what it removes.

It's also worth sizing your actual usage against the numbers before assuming you need to upgrade. A lot of teams jump to Pro anticipating storage or egress pressure that never materializes, when the real trigger was pausing all along — in which case $25/mo buys you an always-on backend more than it buys extra headroom. Conversely, a project genuinely pushing past 8 GB of disk or 250 GB of egress on Pro should budget for metered overage rather than assuming Team is the next required step; the per-GB rates on Pro ($0.125/GB disk, $0.0213/GB storage, $0.09/GB egress, $0.00325/MAU) are usually cheaper in absolute terms than paying $599/mo for Team just to get more headroom you don't structurally need.