Supabase Pro is “from $25/month”. The word doing the work in that sentence is “from”. I went through the pricing page and the cost-control docs line by line on 5 October 2026 to work out what a real project pays, where the bill grows, and when it is worth leaving. Short version: one small project really is $25. Three projects is $45 before a single user shows up. And the spend cap protects you from less than most people assume.
The short answer
| Plan | Price | What you get | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 500 MB database, 1 GB file storage, 2 active projects | Projects pause after 1 week of inactivity |
| Pro | From $25/mo | 100,000 monthly active users, 8 GB disk per project, 250 GB egress, 100 GB file storage, daily backups kept 7 days | Includes $10/mo of compute credits, which covers exactly one Micro project |
| Team | From $599/mo | Pro plus SSO and compliance features | A 24x jump with nothing in between |
All numbers are from supabase.com/pricing as of 5 October 2026. Check the page before you budget, because these move.
How the Pro bill is actually built
Pro is two things added together: a $25 plan fee, and compute for every project you run. The plan includes $10/mo in compute credits, and a Micro instance costs $10/mo, so your first project is covered. Every project after that pays for its own compute.
| Line item | Included on Pro | After that |
|---|---|---|
| Compute, Micro | One project (via the $10 credit) | $10/mo per extra project |
| Compute, Small | Not included | $15/mo per project |
| Monthly active users | 100,000 | $0.00325 per user |
| Database disk | 8 GB per project | $0.125 per GB |
| Egress | 250 GB | $0.09 per GB |
| Cached egress | 250 GB | $0.03 per GB |
| File storage | 100 GB | $0.0213 per GB |
Three real bills
1. One side project, light traffic: $25/mo. One Micro project, well inside every quota. The credit covers compute and you pay the plan fee. This is the case the headline price describes, and it is accurate.
2. Production, staging and one more app: $45/mo. Three Micro projects. The first is covered by the credit, the other two are $10 each. $25 + $10 + $10 = $45, with zero usage. Nobody warns you about this one, and it is the most common way a “$25 backend” turns into something else. Staging environments are not free just because nobody visits them.
3. One busy project: $45/mo. Small compute ($15, minus the $10 credit = $5), 400 GB of egress (150 GB over at $0.09 = $13.50) and a 20 GB database (12 GB over at $0.125 = $1.50). $25 + $5 + $13.50 + $1.50 = $45. Still reasonable. The point is that three separate meters moved it, and each one keeps moving as you grow.
What the spend cap does and does not cover
Spend caps are on by default on Pro. With the cap on, usage items like egress, disk size, storage and monthly active users cannot bill you past the quota. Supabase’s docs are direct about the trade: “After exceeding the quota for a usage item, further usage of that item is disallowed until the next billing cycle.” So the cap swaps a surprise invoice for a surprise outage. That is a fair trade for a hobby project and a bad one for anything customers depend on, which is why Supabase lets you switch it off and pay as you grow.
The cap also does not cover everything. Compute is excluded, along with custom domains, IPv4 addresses, point-in-time recovery and read replicas. The docs give the reason: these are “predictable and explicitly opted into by the user”. In practice it means the $45 three-project bill above happens with the spend cap on.
The free tier is a demo, not a home
500 MB and two projects is generous for trying things out. But free projects pause after a week of inactivity, so a portfolio piece, a client demo or an internal tool that gets used twice a month will be asleep when someone finally opens it. If the project matters at all, you are choosing between $25 and somewhere else.
Three ways to pay less
1. Self-host Supabase
Supabase is open source and ships a Docker Compose setup. The software is free. The server is not. The self-hosting docs list the minimum as 4 GB of RAM, 2 CPU cores and a 40 GB SSD, and recommend 8 GB, 4 cores and 80 GB. You are running Postgres, Auth, PostgREST, Realtime, Storage, an API gateway, Studio and a connection pooler, and you own the upgrades, the backups and the secrets.
Be honest about the math: a server with 4 GB of RAM plus backups is a monthly bill of its own, and it comes with your evenings. Self-hosting wins when you want the exact Supabase API on hardware you control, or when you run many projects and the per-project compute fee is what hurts. It does not win on price for one small app.
2. Keep Postgres, drop the rest
Look at what you actually call. A lot of apps on Supabase use the Postgres database and nothing else: auth goes through a library, files live in object storage, and the API is code you wrote. If that is you, $25 buys a database plus four subsystems you never touch.
The old way to fix that was to rent a VPS and do it all yourself: provision the server, install the runtime, install and tune Postgres, configure nginx, set up SSL, lock down the firewall, add a process manager, point the domain and DNS, then remember to script backups. It works. It is also a weekend, and then it is yours forever.
The version I’d pick is one pod on InstaPods: PostgreSQL as a managed service with the app running next to it, on a real Linux server with SSH. The Build plan is $7/mo flat for 2 vCPU, 2 GB of RAM and 25 GB of disk. There is no egress meter, no per-project compute line and no per-seat fee, so month twelve costs what month one did. You get a $10 credit when you add a card, which covers about the first six weeks.
The honest limits: you get Postgres, not Supabase. There is no Studio, no generated REST layer, and auth, storage and realtime are yours to add. The $3 Launch plan does not include managed databases, so $7 is the real starting price for this setup. And the full Supabase stack will not run on a pod, because pods do not run Docker. I wrote up all five routes, with what each one costs you, in this comparison of self-hosted Supabase alternatives.
3. Stay, and trim
Sometimes the cheapest move is no move. If you lean on auth, storage and realtime together, rebuilding three subsystems to save $18 a month is a bad trade. Trim instead:
- Delete or merge projects you are not using. Each one is $10/mo of compute with the cap on or off.
- Run staging on the free tier if a weekly pause is acceptable there.
- Make storage responses cacheable. Cached egress bills at $0.03 per GB against $0.09 uncached.
- Watch database disk. It is billed per project above 8 GB, so check what is in there before you pay for more.
Which one should you pick?
| Your situation | Best move | Monthly cost |
|---|---|---|
| One app, using auth, storage and realtime | Stay on Pro | $25 and up |
| Several projects, want the real Supabase API | Self-host on a 4 to 8 GB Docker host | The server, plus your time |
| You mostly use the database | Postgres plus your app on one pod | $7 flat |
| Hobby project you open twice a month | Anything but the free tier, or accept the pause | $0 to $7 |
FAQ
Is Supabase really free?
The free plan is real: 500 MB of database, 1 GB of file storage and two active projects for $0. The limit that bites is that free projects pause after one week of inactivity.
Why is my Supabase Pro bill more than $25?
Almost always extra projects. The $10 compute credit covers one Micro project. Every additional project pays $10/mo or more for compute, and the spend cap does not apply to compute.
Does the Supabase spend cap stop all overages?
No. It covers usage items such as egress, disk size, storage and monthly active users, and it stops further usage of an item once the quota is hit. It does not cover compute, custom domains, IPv4 addresses, point-in-time recovery or read replicas.
Is self-hosting Supabase cheaper than Pro?
For one small project, barely. The stack needs at least 4 GB of RAM and 2 cores, and you take on upgrades and backups. It pays off when you run several projects or need the data on your own hardware.
If you are weighing the wider question of running things yourself, I did the full math in Is Self-Hosting Actually Cheaper Than SaaS?, and if the app in front of your database is on Vercel, the Vercel alternatives roundup covers the hosting half of the same decision.