Supabase Pricing 2026: Free Tier Limits, Compute Costs & When to Upgrade

Supabase pricing confuses a lot of developers because the free tier is genuinely useful — until it isn't, and the jump to paid happens for reasons that aren't obvious upfront. This post breaks down every tier, the real limits that trigger an upgrade, and how the costs stack up once you're running a production workload.

What the free tier actually gives you

The free tier is not a trial. You can run a real project on it indefinitely, with these hard limits as of September 2026:

The biggest catch: free projects pause after 7 days of inactivity. Supabase spins down the Postgres instance. The first request after a pause takes 10–30 seconds to cold-start. For a portfolio site or internal tool that gets occasional traffic this is annoying; for a production app with real users it's a deal-breaker.

The second catch is the 2-project limit. If you're a freelancer juggling multiple clients on a single organisation account, you hit this fast. You can work around it by creating separate Supabase organisations per client — each organisation gets its own 2 free projects — but it fragments your billing and makes management awkward.

Pro plan: $25 / month per project

The Pro plan removes pausing and lifts most limits:

At $25 flat the Pro plan is competitive for a small production app. The Micro compute instance is adequate for most CRUD workloads under moderate concurrency. Where it breaks down: connection pooling. Supabase uses PgBouncer (transaction mode) automatically, but if you're running a Next.js App Router site with lots of server components firing parallel queries, you can saturate the connection limit on Micro (roughly 60 direct connections, pooled to ~200).

Compute add-ons: where bills actually grow

Compute is billed separately on top of the Pro plan and is the most common surprise in real invoices.

For a typical Next.js + Supabase content site, Micro handles maybe 50–100 concurrent users comfortably. A SaaS app with background jobs or heavy joins will want Small or Medium. The step from Micro to Small ($10/month add-on) is the most common real-world upgrade — shared vCPUs on Micro cause latency spikes under any sustained load.

Team plan: $599 / month

The Team plan is aimed at startups with a dev team rather than a solo developer. It adds:

• SSO for the Supabase dashboard
• Designated support with a 1-business-day SLA
• 28-day log retention
• Point-in-time recovery (PITR) as an add-on option
• SOC 2 Type II report access
• Priority support queue

At $599/month it covers one project. Additional projects on Team are $599 each. Unless you genuinely need SOC 2 docs for a sales process or PITR for compliance reasons, most teams stay on Pro with a Medium compute add-on and come out significantly cheaper.

Point-in-time recovery costs

PITR is an add-on available on Pro and above. It lets you restore to any second within the retention window, not just daily snapshots.

For a fintech or healthcare product, PITR is non-negotiable. For a marketing site or blog, daily backups (included in Pro) are enough.

What actually forces the upgrade from free to Pro

In practice, the triggers are predictable:

1. Project pausing — the moment a client's staging URL starts cold-starting, you move to Pro.
2. Database exceeding 500 MB — happens faster than expected if you're storing files as bytea columns (don't) or running analytics queries without pagination.
3. Bandwidth over 5 GB — one viral blog post or a client uploading a batch of product images can blow past this in hours.
4. More than 2 projects per organisation — forces either a new org (annoying) or a paid plan.
5. Auth MAUs over 50,000 — unlikely for most projects but it does bite consumer apps that grow unexpectedly.

The free-to-Pro jump at $25 is low enough that I recommend moving production workloads to Pro from day one. The pausing behaviour alone makes free unsuitable for anything customer-facing.

How Supabase compares to PlanetScale and Neon

If you're evaluating Supabase purely as a Postgres host rather than a full backend-as-a-service:

• Neon offers a free tier with no pausing (just auto-suspension after 5 minutes of inactivity, not 7 days), and its paid plan starts at $19/month with branching — better for development workflows.
• PlanetScale dropped its free tier entirely in 2024. Paid starts at $39/month for the Scaler plan with 10 GB storage and 100 GB reads.

If you need Auth, Storage, Edge Functions, and Realtime bundled, Supabase Pro at $25 beats building equivalent infrastructure on any of those platforms. If you only need Postgres, Neon's pricing is more competitive at the low end.

Realistic monthly cost for a production Next.js + Supabase app

A small SaaS with 500 MAUs, 3 GB database, 20 GB bandwidth, and moderate query load:

• Pro plan: $25
• Compute (Small): +$10
• Storage overage: $0 (within 100 GB)
• Bandwidth overage: $0 (within 250 GB)
• Total: $35 / month

A growing SaaS with 5,000 MAUs, 15 GB database, 180 GB bandwidth, and sustained concurrency:

• Pro plan: $25
• Database overage: (15 GB − 8 GB) × $0.125 = $0.875
• Compute (Medium): +$50
• Bandwidth: within limit
• Total: ~$76 / month

Those numbers are predictable. The only time Supabase invoices surprise people is when Edge Function invocations spike from a misconfigured webhook loop or when storage egress accumulates from serving large files directly through Supabase Storage instead of routing through a CDN like Cloudflare.