Supabase Pricing in 2026: What It Really Costs

The sticker prices, straight from Supabase's pricing page

Supabase bundles the whole backend around Postgres - database, auth, storage, edge functions, and realtime in one bill - and as of today, supabase.com/pricing lists four tiers: Free, Pro, Team, and Enterprise. Here is exactly what each one includes, pulled the same day this article published.

One framing note before the numbers: every price below is the pre-tax USD list price from the vendor's public pricing page as of 2026-07-11, on monthly billing. Your actual invoice adds VAT or sales tax where applicable, egress rates can vary by region, and the usage-based line items move with real consumption - read these figures as the structure of the bill, not the final total.

Two structural things stand out immediately. First, the $25 and $599 headline prices are base platform fees - they do not include the compute instance your database actually runs on, which is a separate line item covered below. Second, Pro and Team both include the same $10/month in compute credits - "enough to cover one Micro instance," as Supabase's pricing page puts it. That means a $599/month Team customer gets exactly as much free compute as a $25/month Pro customer - the extra $574 is entirely for compliance certifications and support, not capacity.

Supabase also runs spend caps, and the wording matters if you have been burned by a metered platform before: "The Pro Plan has a spend cap enabled by default to keep costs under control. If you want to scale beyond the plan's included quota, simply switch off the spend cap to pay for additional resources." In plain terms, Pro defaults to a hard ceiling - your project throttles or blocks new usage rather than silently billing you - unless you explicitly flip that off to allow pay-as-you-grow overages. That default-safe posture is unusual among usage-based platforms and worth knowing before you assume Supabase behaves like AWS.

Three real workloads, priced honestly

The headline numbers do not tell you what you will actually pay, so here is the same three-tier exercise most infrastructure pricing needs: side project, small startup, and a SaaS with real database load.

A weekend MVP or portfolio project stays on Free indefinitely as long as you are under 50,000 monthly active users, your database stays under 500 MB, and you touch the project at least once a week (Supabase's own wording: "Free projects are paused after 1 week of inactivity. Limit of 2 active projects."). Cost: $0/month, with the honest caveat that a paused project needs a manual un-pause before it serves traffic again - not a good fit for anything with unpredictable real users.

A small startup with modest but real traffic moves to Pro at $25/month. The default Micro compute instance is covered by the included credit, but Micro's connection ceiling (60 direct, 200 pooled) starts to pinch once you have more than a handful of concurrent backend processes. Stepping up to Small ($15/month) costs $15 minus the $10 credit, or $5/month net - so a realistic small production stack runs $25 + $5 = $30/month, before any usage overage.

A growing SaaS with a real database typically needs Large compute ($110/month, the first tier with a dedicated rather than shared CPU) and starts brushing against the included quotas. Say the database grows to 40 GB (32 GB over the 8 GB included, at $0.125/GB = $4/month) and monthly egress hits 400 GB (150 GB over the 250 GB included, at $0.09/GB = $13.50/month). The math: $25 base + $100 net compute (Large minus the $10 credit) + $4 database overage + $13.50 egress overage = roughly $142.50/month - a long way from the $25 sticker, and this workload has not touched Team-tier compliance requirements yet.

The compute add-on ladder: from $10 Micro to $3,730 16XL

This is the part of Supabase's pricing that a $25/month headline hides completely, and it is the single biggest lever on your actual bill. Every project runs on a compute add-on, and the ladder gets steep fast:

The jump that catches people off guard is Medium to Large: $60 to $110 is only an $50 increase, but it is also the line where you move from a shared-CPU instance to a dedicated-CPU one, per Supabase's published specs - the first tier where your database is not sharing compute cycles with a neighbor. Below Large, you are technically on multi-tenant hardware even though you are paying for a private add-on. If predictable query latency matters, budget for Large as the real production floor, not Medium.

Disk is priced separately from compute. General Purpose disk includes 8 GB, then charges $0.125/GB, with 3,000 IOPS included (then $0.024/IOPS) and 125 MB/s throughput included (then $0.095/MB/s), rated at 99.9% durability. A High Performance disk tier exists above that - $0.195/GB and $0.119/IOPS with automatic throughput scaling and 99.999% durability - for workloads where disk latency, not just capacity, is the bottleneck.

Where usage-based overages actually add up

Beyond compute and disk, Supabase meters several product surfaces independently, and the free-vs-Pro included quotas differ enough to matter:

None of these individually looks dangerous, but a growing app burns several of them at once. Realtime is the one worth watching closest if you build anything collaborative (live cursors, presence, chat): 500 included connections sounds generous until a single popular session with 600 concurrent viewers costs an extra $1/day in overage just from that one spike, on top of whatever message volume it generates.

The branch-per-hour trap (and the smaller add-ons)

Supabase's database branching - spin up an isolated Postgres branch per pull request, the same workflow Neon popularized - is billed at $0.01344 per hour per branch. Do the month-long math: $0.01344 x 24 hours x 30 days is about $9.68/month per branch left running continuously. A single active feature branch is cheap. Five preview branches that outlive their pull requests because nobody remembered to tear them down is roughly $48/month in compute nobody is using - the same class of mistake as an EC2 instance nobody terminated, just smaller and easier to lose track of because it looks like "just a branch."

A few smaller add-ons round out the bill: Point-in-Time Recovery costs $100/month per 7 days of retention, a custom domain is $10/domain/month per project, log drains run $60/month plus $0.20 per million events plus $0.09/GB of egress, and phone-based MFA is $75 for the first project and $10 for each additional one. None of these are surprising in isolation, but PITR at $100/month is worth flagging specifically - it roughly doubles the cost of a Large-compute production database, and it is easy to enable during a security review and forget is now a recurring line item.

Free tier's real job: MVPs, not staging environments

The Free tier's actual constraints are stricter than the "$0/month" headline suggests. Per Supabase's own pricing page: "Free projects are paused after 1 week of inactivity. Limit of 2 active projects." That second part matters more than it looks - two active projects total, across your entire account, not per workspace. A team running a staging environment and a production environment on Free is already at the ceiling before adding a second real product.

The pause behavior is the other trap. A paused Free project is not deleted, but it stops serving requests until someone manually resumes it in the dashboard - meaning any staging or demo environment that only gets touched during a sales call is a bad fit for Free. Budget for Pro ($25/month) the moment a project needs to be reliably available, not just cheaply available.

Supabase vs Neon: full backend platform or pay-as-you-go Postgres

The most common alternative comparison is Neon, and the two products price themselves in genuinely different shapes as of today. Supabase bundles a fixed monthly platform fee ($25 Pro, $599 Team) plus compute/disk/usage add-ons. Neon, checked the same day at neon.com/pricing, has moved to fully consumption-based pricing on its paid tiers: Launch and Scale are both labeled "Usage-based" on the plan cards, with no fixed monthly platform fee

• compute is metered at $0.106/CU-hour on Launch and $0.222/CU-hour on Scale, storage at $0.35/GB-month on both, and extra branches cost $1.50/branch-month prorated hourly (versus Supabase's $0.01344/hour per branch, which is a genuinely different rate structure worth running through your own branch count before assuming either is cheaper).

Neon's Free tier is also structured differently: 100 CU-hours and 0.5 GB of storage per project, but up to 100 projects and up to 60,000 MAU for auth - more projects, less database size per project, versus Supabase's 2-project cap with a bigger 500 MB single-database allowance. If your workflow is "one Postgres database, plus auth, storage, and edge functions in the same product," Supabase's bundle is the more direct fit. If your workflow is "many small Postgres branches with per-second billing precision and no interest in auth/storage/functions," Neon's model is built for exactly that

• our Neon vs Supabase comparison goes deeper on the workflow-level tradeoffs beyond just price.

When Supabase's pricing works - and when it doesn't

Supabase earns its price when you actually use the bundle: auth, storage, edge functions, and realtime running against the same Postgres database means you are not separately paying for Auth0, S3, and a message broker on top of a database bill. The Free tier is one of the more genuinely usable free tiers in the category for an early MVP, and the default-on spend cap protects you from the classic "forgot to set a billing alert" horror story.

It stops making sense in two situations. First, if you only need Postgres and nothing else in the bundle - auth, storage, and realtime you are not using are dead weight, and a narrower product likely prices lower for the same database. Second, if your team runs many short-lived preview branches and nobody owns cleanup - the $0.01344/hour meter is cheap per branch but compounds quietly across a busy team, and it is worth a monthly audit of branches that outlived their pull request, the same way you would audit unattached cloud volumes.

Keep reading

• Neon vs Supabase — the direct head-to-head on workflow and pricing model, not just the dollar figures in this piece.
• Heroku pricing 2026 — the same live-verified, worked-example treatment applied to a PaaS instead of a backend platform.
• Best serverless databases 2026 — widens the field beyond Supabase and Neon if you have not committed to a vendor yet.

The bottom line

Supabase's 2026 pricing is honest about its numbers but easy to under-budget on first read: the $25 and $599 headlines are platform fees, not compute, and the real bill is platform fee plus a compute size plus whatever you go over on database, egress, storage, or branches. Free is a genuinely strong starting point for an MVP as long as you respect the 2-project cap and the weekly-activity pause. Beyond that, the honest planning move is the same one that applies to any usage-based platform: run one real month on Pro, read the usage dashboard, and size your compute instance and add-ons off actual numbers instead of the sticker price.

Prices verified directly against supabase.com/pricing, the Supabase Edge Functions pricing docs, and neon.com/pricing on 2026-07-11.