How Supabase pricing is shaped
Supabase bills two things: a flat plan fee per project (Free, Pro, Team) or per organization (Enterprise) plus metered usage that stacks on top. The plan fee buys you a compute size, a database quota, a storage quota, a bandwidth allowance, an Auth MAU allowance, and features like PITR and SSO. Metered usage kicks in when you exceed the included amounts; every plan surfaces alerts you can wire to email or Slack before overages hit. Compared to per-operation platforms like Firebase, the shape is far more predictable but rewards you for right-sizing the project.
Free — $0
Two active projects per organization, 500MB database, 1GB storage, 50k monthly active users on Auth, 2GB egress per month, 500K Edge Function invocations, and community support. The catch: projects on Free pause after seven days of inactivity. A green status badge on your dashboard will not save you if the project is paused; the first request wakes it, and everything before that returns 5xx. Free is perfect for portfolios, hackathons, and prototypes. Do not run anything a customer is paying for on it.
Pro — $25 per project per month
8GB database, 100GB storage, 100k MAU, 250GB egress, 2M Edge Function invocations, no auto-pause, daily backups with 7-day retention. Compute defaults to the Micro tier (1 vCPU, 1GB RAM) and can be upgraded per project up to XL, XXL, or above as separate compute add-ons. This is the tier real production apps start on, and the plan where most teams sit for years. The $25 fee is per project, so a five-project organization pays $125 base before overages.
Team — $599 per organization per month
Everything in Pro across all projects in the org, plus SOC 2 Type II report, SSO for the dashboard, 28-day Point-In-Time Recovery retention, priority support with a defined response SLA, shared org-wide billing, and log retention up from 1 day to 28. Pick this the day an enterprise customer asks for your security-review PDF, or the day the number of projects times $25 approaches $599 and you would rather buy the compliance bundle. HIPAA BAA is available as an add-on on Team.
Enterprise — custom quote
Dedicated infrastructure, custom SLAs, SAML SSO for the dashboard, custom data residency, a named solutions architect, and volume discounts on compute. Priced from a call, usually starting in the low-five-figures per month depending on workload. Companies land here when they need a signed contract, a specific region their customers demand, or bespoke networking (VPC peering, PrivateLink). If you are asking whether you need Enterprise, you probably do not yet.
Compute add-ons
Every project runs on a compute instance separate from the plan fee. Micro (default on Pro) handles small production traffic. Small, Medium, Large, XL, and XXL step up vCPU and RAM linearly and roughly double the monthly cost at each step. Compute is the single biggest lever on Supabase performance: an under-sized database at high concurrency is the number one reason apps feel slow. Upsize before RAM saturates, not after; the dashboard's compute upgrade is zero-downtime for most transitions.
The overages that actually bite people
- Egress — dashboards streaming raw JSON to browsers, image proxies serving originals, and unoptimized realtime subscriptions burn bandwidth fast. Cache aggressively at the edge and paginate.
- Storage — image-heavy apps hit the storage cap before the database cap. Enable the Smart CDN, resize on upload, and prune orphaned files with a scheduled job.
- Compute — an under-sized DB shows up as random 500s and query timeouts under load. Watch RAM and CPU in the dashboard and upsize proactively.
- Auth MAUs — every user who signs in once in a calendar month counts. Turning off anonymous sign-ins that you no longer use can trim this line.
- Edge Function GB-seconds — a slow function with a big bundle costs more per invocation than a fast one; shrinking bundles saves money as well as latency.
When to move up a tier
Move from Free to Pro the moment a real customer depends on the project — the auto-pause alone justifies it. Move from Pro to Team when compliance shows up on a contract, when you cross five or six projects and the per-project math stops making sense, or when you need PITR retention past seven days for regulatory reasons. Move from Team to Enterprise when you need contractual SLAs, a dedicated region, or networking your team has to negotiate rather than click. Most product teams live happily on Pro forever.
How to keep the bill predictable
Set spend caps and usage alerts in the org billing screen so surprises hit your inbox, not your credit card. Right-size compute rather than defaulting to Micro forever. Turn on the Smart CDN for public storage buckets. Cache Data API responses at the edge or in the client when they are not per-user. Prune Auth accounts you do not need. Review the usage dashboard once a month; the same three lines (egress, storage, compute) explain 90% of every unexpected charge and are all easy to fix once you see them.
What happens when you exceed a quota
Every metered line has a defined behavior on overage. Egress and function invocations bill per unit at published rates once you cross the included amount. Database size and storage produce warnings first and, if the org has a spend cap, will start returning write errors rather than silently billing. Auth MAUs bill per additional 1k users past the included tier. None of these are surprise-lock scenarios — Supabase surfaces alerts in the dashboard, on the billing screen, and via email as you approach each threshold. Wire those alerts into Slack or PagerDuty so someone sees them before the credit card does.
Team seats and access control
Every plan supports multiple team members in the same org, with roles for owner, administrator, developer, and read-only. Pro projects and org-level members do not add per-seat cost; you pay for infrastructure and features, not headcount. Team introduces SSO for the dashboard, so you can require Google or Microsoft login for anyone accessing the project. Enterprise adds SAML and audit logs for every action taken in the dashboard. If your compliance program requires role-based access control and audit trails at the platform layer, that is the tier boundary to plan for.
Free vs Pro: the real decision framework
The rule of thumb is: Free is for you, Pro is for anyone else. If nobody who is not on your team relies on the project being reachable, Free is perfect and the auto-pause behavior is fine. The moment a paying customer, a job interviewer, a beta user, or a webhook consumer depends on the URL responding within a second, upgrade. $25 per month buys you 24/7 availability, daily backups, a 16x database quota, and the ability to sleep through the night without worrying about a paused project. Teams that leave production on Free almost always regret it after the first outage that a Pro plan would have prevented for the cost of a lunch.
Comparing Supabase pricing to alternatives
Against Firebase, Supabase is more predictable at scale and slightly more expensive at very low volume. Against Neon or PlanetScale (pure database platforms), Supabase bundles more services (Auth, Storage, Functions) into the plan fee, so the sticker price is higher but the all-in cost of an equivalent stack is usually lower. Against running Postgres on RDS with your own auth service, Supabase is dramatically cheaper for small-to-mid workloads and roughly comparable at large ones, with the added value of the managed dashboard and the open-source escape hatch. Priced feature-for-feature, Supabase Pro is one of the better deals in the managed-backend category.