Supabase Review 2026: Real Pro Plan Costs, Free Tier Pauses and the Fine Print

The short verdict

Supabase is one of the best-value ways to get a managed Postgres database with authentication, storage and an API already wired in. For a single production app on the default Micro instance, Pro costs about $25 a month before usage overages, which is hard to beat for what you get.

The catch is that the bill scales per project, not per account. Every extra project adds compute, the most useful safety features (point-in-time recovery, custom domains, log drains) are paid add-ons outside the spend cap, and an uptime SLA only exists on Enterprise. The Free plan is excellent for prototypes but pauses after a week of inactivity and has no backups, so it is not a home for anything real users depend on.

What Supabase actually is

Supabase describes itself as a Postgres development platform. Each project is its own Postgres database running on AWS, with a set of services built around it:

• Database: plain Postgres with a spreadsheet-style Table Editor, a SQL Editor and auto-generated REST and GraphQL APIs.
• Auth: email, OAuth, magic links and phone sign-in, with 50,000 monthly active users on Free and 100,000 on Pro.
• Storage: S3-style file buckets with row-level security policies, plus image transformations on paid plans.
• Realtime: database change streams, broadcast and presence over WebSockets.
• Edge Functions: server-side TypeScript functions deployed globally.
• Vector: embeddings stored in Postgres with pgvector.
• Queues: in Supabase's words, "a Postgres-native durable Message Queue system with guaranteed delivery built on the pgmq database extension".
• Cron: scheduled jobs written with standard cron syntax, also running inside Postgres.

Because the core is ordinary Postgres, lock-in is lower than with most backend-as-a-service products. You can dump the database with standard tools and move it elsewhere. Supabase is also open source and can be self-hosted, with one documented limit: "Self-hosted Supabase runs as a single project, which means that Studio doesn't support multiple organizations or projects."

Supabase pricing plans in 2026

There are four plans. The headline prices are per organization per month, and quotas are shared across the whole organization: "The quota is applied to your entire organization, independent of how many projects you launch within that organization."

• Free - $0: 500 MB database, shared CPU with 500 MB RAM, 5 GB egress, 5 GB cached egress, 1 GB file storage, 50,000 MAU, community support. Limit of 2 active projects, paused after 1 week of inactivity.
• Pro - from $25: includes one project on Micro compute, 8 GB disk per project (then $0.125 per GB), 250 GB egress (then $0.09 per GB), 250 GB cached egress (then $0.03 per GB), 100 GB file storage (then $0.0213 per GB), 100,000 MAU (then $0.00325 per MAU), email support, daily backups kept 7 days, 7-day log retention.
• Team - from $599: everything in Pro plus SOC 2 and ISO 27001 reports, SSO for the dashboard, HIPAA as a paid add-on, priority email support with response SLAs, 14-day backups and 28-day log retention. Also includes one project on Micro compute.
• Enterprise - custom: uptime SLAs, AWS PrivateLink, 24/7/365 premium support, a private Slack channel and a technical account manager.

Usage quotas on Pro and Team are generous for most apps: 2 million Edge Function invocations (then $2 per million), 500 Realtime peak connections (then $10 per 1,000), 5 million Realtime messages (then $2.50 per million), 20 GB of log ingestion (then $0.50 per GB) and file uploads up to 500 GB each, against 50 MB on Free.

How compute is billed

Compute is the line that grows as you add projects or need more power. It is billed by the hour per project, and partial hours round up: "If a project runs for part of an hour, you are still charged for the full hour." On paid plans, Nano instances are billed at the same price as Micro, so there is no cheaper tier below Micro once you upgrade.

• Micro: $0.01344 per hour, about $10 a month - shared CPU, 1 GB RAM, recommended for databases up to 10 GB.
• Small: $0.0206 per hour, about $15 a month - shared CPU, 2 GB RAM, up to 50 GB.
• Medium: $0.0822 per hour, about $60 a month - shared CPU, 4 GB RAM, up to 100 GB.
• Large: $0.1517 per hour, about $110 a month - 2 dedicated vCPUs, 8 GB RAM, up to 200 GB.
• XL: about $210 a month - 4 vCPUs, 16 GB RAM. 2XL: about $410 a month - 8 vCPUs, 32 GB RAM.
• 4XL to 16XL: about $960 to $3,730 a month, from 16 vCPUs and 64 GB RAM up to 64 vCPUs and 256 GB RAM. Larger sizes are quote-only.

The $10 compute credit on paid plans resets monthly and does not roll over. It only applies to project compute: "Compute Credits apply only to Compute and do not cover other line items, including Read Replica Compute and Branching Compute." A read replica is billed as another instance at the normal compute rate, and each preview branch starts at the Micro hourly rate.

Disk is a separate line. Each project gets 8 GB, then $0.125 per GB. Disk performance includes 3,000 IOPS and 125 MB/s of throughput; going past that costs $0.024 per extra IOPS and $0.95 per extra MB/s.

What a real monthly bill looks like

These examples use Supabase's published rates, before usage overages and tax. The three-project figure is Supabase's own worked example from its billing FAQ.

• Hobby project on Free: $0, but limited to 2 active projects, a 500 MB database, no backups and a pause after a week without activity.
• One production app on Pro, Micro compute: $25 + about $10 Micro - $10 credit = about $25 a month.
• Three apps on Pro, all on Micro: $25 + $30 compute - $10 credit = $45 a month.
• One app on Pro, Large compute (2 dedicated vCPUs, 8 GB RAM): $25 + about $110 - $10 = about $125 a month.
• One app on Pro, Small compute, with 7-day PITR and a custom domain: $25 + about $15 - $10 + about $100 + $10 = about $140 a month.

Timing matters too. "The subscription plan fee is charged upfront, whereas usage-charges, including compute, are charged in arrears." So your first invoice after adding projects or resizing an instance will be higher than the plan price suggests, because it carries last month's compute.

The Free plan: generous, but it pauses

For learning and prototypes the Free plan is genuinely useful. It includes unlimited API requests, 50,000 monthly active users, 500,000 Edge Function invocations, 200 Realtime peak connections and 2 million Realtime messages. The limits that matter are elsewhere:

• Pausing: "Free projects are paused after 1 week of inactivity."
• Project count: 2 active projects, counted across every organization where you are an Owner or Administrator. Paused projects do not count toward the limit.
• No backups: Supabase recommends that Free projects "regularly export their data using the Supabase CLI db dump command and maintain off-site backups."
• No branching, no image transformations, a 50 MB upload limit and only 1 day of API and database logs.
• Compute is a shared CPU with 500 MB RAM, and Supabase notes that "Compute resources on the Free Plan are subject to change."

Going over the Free quotas does not create a bill, but it can break your app. Supabase lists the possible restrictions as pausing projects, switching databases to read-only mode, blocking new project launches or returning a 402 status code for all API requests. Plans cannot be mixed inside one organization, so if one project needs Pro, the whole organization moves to Pro.

The fine print: spend cap, add-ons and refunds

The spend cap does not cap everything

Pro has a spend cap, switched on by default. With it on, "further usage of that item is disallowed until the next billing cycle" once you exceed a quota. With it off, overages are billed per unit. The cap covers disk size, egress, Edge Function invocations, logs, MAU, Realtime, image transformations and storage size.

It does not cover anything Supabase treats as predictable and opted into: compute, branching compute, read replica compute, custom domains, extra disk IOPS and throughput, IPv4, log drains, MFA phone and PITR. It also cannot set a budget or send alerts: "The Spend Cap doesn't allow for fine-grained cost control, such as setting budgets... or receiving notifications." Team and Enterprise have no spend cap at all.

Add-ons that are easy to forget

• Point-in-time recovery: about $100 a month for 7 days, $200 for 14 days, $400 for 28 days. Turning it on replaces daily backups.
• Custom domain: $10 a month.
• Dedicated IPv4 address: $4 a month.
• Log drains: $60 a month per drain plus $0.20 per million events and egress. Available on Pro since 5 March 2026; before that they were Team and up.
• MFA by phone: $75 a month for the first project, $10 for each additional one.
• Pipelines (public alpha since July 2026): $0.053 per pipeline per hour, plus $3.00 per GB during ongoing replication and $0.60 per GB during initial sync.

Billing terms

• No refunds: "No, we do not provide refunds." Downgrading gives you non-expiring credit for unused plan time instead.
• Credit cards only, invoices in US dollars, which "may show up as coming from Singapore".
• No official annual plans, although you can prepay with a credit top-up.
• Unpaid invoices mean "we will pause your projects and downgrade your organization to the Free Plan", and payment cannot be delayed.
• Sales tax and VAT collection rolled out between 1 May and 30 June 2026, so recent invoices may be higher than older ones for the same usage.

Reliability and uptime

Supabase only commits to uptime on Enterprise: "Each product is individually covered by a 99.9% uptime commitment for customers with an Enterprise tier subscription." Service credits run from 10% of fees below 99.9% to 30% below 96.0%, capped at 20% of the fees paid over the previous 12 months. Free, Pro and Team have no uptime SLA.

The most serious incident with an official write-up this year was on 12 February 2026 in us-east-2 (Ohio). "The outage lasted 3 hours and 42 minutes", caused by "a configuration error stemming from insufficient guardrails in our infrastructure deployment pipeline."

Autumn 2026 has been busy on the official status page:

• 24 September: a critical incident with permission errors in the Supabase Dashboard.
• 29 September: intermittent latency in the Eastern US, open for roughly 164 hours.
• 12 October: Realtime latency, open for roughly 45 hours.
• 21 October: a major incident with project lifecycle operations failing in all regions.
• 22 October: major incidents with lifecycle errors in the EU region (about 12 hours) and elevated Management API error rates in multiple regions.

Several of these hit the control plane (dashboard, project creation, management API) rather than running databases, but they still block deploys and restores. For anything revenue-critical, keep your own off-site dumps even on Pro, and treat PITR as a requirement rather than a luxury.

Support

Free gets community support. Pro gets email support with no response-time commitment. Response SLAs start on Team: "Supabase provides Support Service Level Agreements for Team and Enterprise customers."

• Team: urgent issues within 24 hours (24/7), high and normal within 1 business day, low within 2 business days.
• Enterprise Standard: urgent within 1 hour (24/7), high within 2 business hours, normal within 1 business day, low within 2 business days.
• Priority Plus: urgent 1 hour, high 2 hours, normal 12 hours, low 24 hours, all around the clock.

The jump from Pro at $25 to Team at $599 is steep, and a 24-hour urgent response on Team is slow for a production outage. Most small teams on Pro rely on the docs, GitHub discussions and the community Discord in practice.

Day-to-day developer experience

This is where Supabase earns its popularity. Creating a project gives you a database, auth and an API in a couple of minutes, and the dashboard covers most daily tasks: browsing tables, running SQL, writing row-level security policies, testing Edge Functions and reading logs.

The 2026 releases have mostly improved workflow rather than adding new products: branching without Git became the default in May, Unified Logs entered open beta in July, Postgres Changes gained AND filters and column selection in August, Declarative Schemas 2.0 shipped in October and the .NET SDK was unified the same month. Supabase is also available as an official ChatGPT app, and "Sign in with ChatGPT" entered beta in July.

The weak spots are cost visibility and log retention. Logs last 1 day on Free and 7 days on Pro, and there are no budget alerts, so you find out about a costly month from the invoice.

Security, compliance and data location

Supabase is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant and ISO 27001 certified, with data "encrypted at rest with AES-256 and in transit via TLS". The SOC 2 report is only available to Team and Enterprise customers, which matters if a client's security review asks for it.

HIPAA is possible but expensive to reach. It is a paid add-on on Team and Enterprise, requires a Business Associate Agreement, and Supabase does not publish its price. HIPAA projects must also run PITR, "which requires at least a small compute add-on", plus SSL enforcement and network restrictions.

All projects run in AWS regions. If you pick a broad region, Supabase deploys to "an available AWS region within that broader area", and "the 'Europe' general region includes London and Zurich, which are not EU member states." If EU data residency matters, pick a specific EU region rather than the general one.

Where Supabase is heading

Supabase is well funded. In June 2026 it raised a $500M Series F at a $10B pre-money valuation, led by GIC, with all existing investors joining. On 2 October 2026 it announced it is acquiring Turso, the team that rebuilt SQLite in Rust. The stated aim is cheap, on-demand databases for AI agents, and Supabase says that "For existing users, nothing changes. Supabase will continue building around Postgres."

The company says it already launches over one million databases a week. It is also working on Multigres, an open-source project for scaling Postgres horizontally, released as a v0.1 alpha and not yet production-ready. For buyers, the funding lowers the risk of the platform disappearing. The AI-agent focus is worth watching, because much of the recent roadmap is aimed at that audience rather than at traditional app teams.

Who should use Supabase, and who should not

Good fit

• Solo developers and small teams shipping one or two apps who want Postgres, auth and storage without managing servers.
• Projects that may outgrow a backend-as-a-service later, since the data is standard Postgres and portable.
• Prototypes, hackathons and AI-generated apps on the Free plan, as long as you accept the pause and keep your own exports.

Think twice

• Agencies or teams running many small projects: each one adds about $10 a month of compute on top of the plan fee.
• Businesses that need a contractual uptime SLA but cannot justify an Enterprise contract.
• Teams that need hard budget limits or alerts, since the spend cap skips compute and add-ons and sends no notifications.
• Regulated workloads on a tight budget, because HIPAA needs Team, an unpublished add-on price, PITR and at least Small compute.

Frequently asked questions

How much does Supabase Pro really cost per month?

About $25 for one project on Micro compute, then more for each additional project. The $25 fee includes $10 of compute credit that covers one Micro instance. Three Micro projects cost $45, and a single project on Large compute is about $125 before add-ons.

Will Supabase pause my free project?

Yes, after 1 week of inactivity. Free projects can also be paused or made read-only if they keep exceeding quotas. Paid projects are not paused for inactivity.

Does the spend cap stop all extra charges?

No. It stops usage-based items like egress, storage and MAU, but not compute, read replicas, branching, PITR, custom domains, IPv4, log drains or MFA phone. It also does not send alerts or let you set a budget.

Can I get a refund from Supabase?

No. Supabase states that it does not provide refunds. If you downgrade, unused plan time becomes credit on your organization that does not expire.

Does the Free plan include backups?

No. Free projects have no backups, and Supabase recommends exporting data regularly with the CLI db dump command. Pro keeps daily backups for 7 days and Team for 14 days.

Is there an uptime SLA on Pro or Team?

No. The 99.9% uptime SLA with service credits is only for Enterprise customers. Team gets support response-time SLAs, and Pro gets email support without one.

Can I move off Supabase later?

Yes, more easily than with most backend services. The database is standard Postgres, so you can dump and restore it elsewhere, and Supabase itself is open source and self-hostable as a single project.

Can I pay annually or by invoice?

Not officially. Supabase bills monthly by credit card only, though you can prepay with a credit top-up. Enterprise terms are negotiated separately.

Key takeaways

• Pro is $25 for one project on Micro compute; every extra project adds about $10 a month or more.
• The Free plan is great for prototypes but pauses after 1 week of inactivity, caps you at 2 active projects and has no backups.
• The spend cap does not cover compute, PITR, custom domains, log drains or other add-ons, and it sends no alerts.
• There are no refunds, no official annual plans and card-only payment.
• An uptime SLA only exists on Enterprise, and autumn 2026 saw several major control-plane incidents.
• Because it is plain Postgres, Supabase carries less lock-in than most backend-as-a-service platforms.