If you’re building an MVP, a side project, or an internal tool and wondering whether Supabase free tier limits will hold up, this is the guide to bookmark. Supabase offers a genuinely generous free tier, but it comes with specific limits that catch developers off guard if they haven’t read the fine print.
This post breaks down every single free tier limit in 2026, what happens when you hit them, how the free plan compares to Firebase, and exactly when it makes sense to upgrade.
What Is Supabase and Why Does Its Free Tier Matter?
Supabase is an open-source backend platform built on top of Postgres. It gives you a full database, authentication, file storage, edge functions, and real-time subscriptions, all wired together and accessible via a clean dashboard and auto-generated APIs.
What makes it stand out is that all of this comes on $0 supabase bill, not a stripped-down demo, but a real dedicated Postgres database with functional auth, storage, and edge functions included. For solo developers and small teams building early-stage products, that is a significant head start.
The free tier is also where most developers start. Understanding exactly what it includes, and where it stops, determines whether your project can stay on it or needs to move to a paid plan.
Supabase Free Pricing Tier Limits Explained
Supabase bundles its free tier limits across six core feature areas. Here is exactly what you get in 2026, pulled directly from the official Supabase pricing page.
Database Storage: 500 MB
Your free project runs on a shared compute instance with 500 MB RAM and 500 MB database size. That is enough for most early-stage projects, but it fills up faster than expected if you are storing JSON blobs, logs, or uncompressed data.
There are no automatic backups on the free plan. If your data is important to you, the 500 MB limit is not your biggest risk, the lack of backups is. We have published a step-by-step guide to automatically backing up your Supabase free tier database for free using GitHub Actions and Cloudflare R2. Set it up once and forget it.
The database also runs with 60 max direct connections and 200 pooler connections. For solo and low-traffic projects, that is more than adequate. Once you start hitting connection limits, that is a strong signal to move to at least a Micro compute instance on the Pro plan.
File Storage: 1 GB
Free projects include 1 GB of file storage with a 50 MB maximum upload size per file. Custom access controls are included, so you can lock down buckets with row level security policies from day one.
What is not included: image transformations and the Smart CDN. Free plan storage uses a basic CDN only, which means no on-the-fly image resizing or format conversion. If your app handles user-uploaded images that need to be served in different sizes, you either handle that client-side or upgrade.
Egress and Bandwidth: 5 GB Per Month
Egress covers data leaving your project, both direct database egress and cached storage egress via the CDN. The free plan gives you 5 GB of each per month.
For a low-traffic app, 5 GB is comfortable. For an app that serves images, large JSON payloads, or real-time data streams at any meaningful scale, you can burn through it quickly. The best way to stretch your egress allowance is to cache aggressively and avoid fetching large datasets unnecessarily from the client.
Supabase Auth: 50,000 Monthly Active Users
This is one of the most generous limits on the free plan and one that developers often underestimate. You get 50,000 monthly active users (MAUs) included, which covers the vast majority of early-stage apps.
One important distinction: Supabase counts total users stored as unlimited. Only users who authenticate within a calendar month count toward your MAU quota. If you have 200,000 registered users but only 30,000 log in this month, you are within the free limit.
The free plan includes social OAuth providers, anonymous sign-ins, custom SMTP, and basic multi-factor authentication. What it does not include: leaked password protection, session timeouts, single session per user controls, SAML/SSO, and the ability to remove Supabase branding from auth emails.
Edge Functions: 500,000 Invocations Per Month
Edge functions let you run server-side code at the edge without managing infrastructure. The free plan gives you 500,000 invocations per month, which is a solid allowance for background jobs, webhooks, and lightweight API logic.
There is no separate mention of execution time limits in the pricing table, but Supabase does enforce fair use policies across the board. For AI automation workflows, which often chain edge function calls together, keep an eye on how quickly your invocations accumulate across multiple functions.
Realtime: 200 Concurrent Connections and 2 Million Messages
Supabase Realtime lets you subscribe to Postgres changes and broadcast messages across connected clients. The free tier allows up to 200 peak concurrent connections and 2 million messages per month, with a 256 KB maximum message size.
For a single-project MVP with modest real-time features, 200 concurrent connections is workable. Once you start building collaborative tools, live dashboards, or multiplayer features, this ceiling will become a constraint faster than most other free tier limits.
Active Projects: 2 Maximum
The most structurally important limit on the free plan is that you can only have 2 active projects at any one time. Paused projects do not count toward this limit, which means you can archive older projects and spin up new ones as needed.
Two active projects is actually well-suited for a development and production environment split, which Supabase even acknowledges on their pricing page. Most developers building a single product will find this perfectly adequate.
Project Pausing: The Catch Most Developers Learn the Hard Way
Free projects pause automatically after one week of inactivity. When Supabase says inactivity, it means no database activity, not no dashboard visits, not no API calls that returned cached responses. If no actual queries reach your database for 7 days, the compute instance shuts down.
When a project resumes, it takes around 30 seconds to wake up. For a development environment, that is merely annoying. For a live app with real users, a 30-second cold start on the first request is unacceptable.
The good news is that this is entirely preventable without upgrading. We built a lightweight n8n automation workflow that keeps your project alive by inserting a daily ping to a dedicated database table, resetting the inactivity timer silently in the background. You can read the full step-by-step guide to keeping your Supabase free project live past the 7-day limit and set it up in under 10 minutes.
If you need a project that never pauses, does not require a workaround, and supports real production workloads, Supabase Pro plan removes pausing entirely for $25 per month.
What Happens When You Hit Supabase Free Tier Limit?
Supabase does not cut your project off without warning. When you reach within 20% of any plan limit, you receive an email notification. You can also monitor your usage at any time from the Supabase dashboard.
After a limit is reached and a grace period passes, restrictions kick in depending on which limit was hit. Your database can be switched to read-only mode, new uploads to storage can be blocked, auth signups can be rejected, or API requests can start returning 402 errors. If you have already used a grace period and exceed limits again, no second grace period is granted.
The practical takeaway is to set up monitoring before you hit limits, not after. The Supabase dashboard shows your usage in real time. For storage and egress limits, build habits around data hygiene early: compress files before upload, avoid serving full-resolution images unnecessarily, and clean up unused data regularly.
Supabase vs Firebase Free Tier Limits
The two most common options developers compare for a hosted backend are Supabase and Firebase. Here is how their free tiers stack up directly.
| Feature | Supabase Free | Firebase Spark (Free) |
|---|---|---|
| Database | 500 MB Postgres | 1 GB Firestore |
| File Storage | 1 GB | 5 GB |
| Egress/Bandwidth | 5 GB/month | 10 GB/month |
| Auth (MAUs) | 50,000 | Unlimited (Firebase Auth is always free) |
| Functions | 500,000 invocations | 2 million invocations |
| Realtime | 200 concurrent connections | 100 simultaneous connections |
| Database Type | Relational (SQL, Postgres) | NoSQL (document-based) |
| Project Pausing | Yes, after 7 days inactivity | No |
| Backups | None | None |
| Open Source | Yes | No |
Firebase’s free tier is more generous on storage and bandwidth at the outset. But Supabase gives you a relational database, which is a fundamentally different and more powerful data model for most structured production apps. If your project needs complex queries, joins, or row level security, Supabase wins outright regardless of the storage difference.
At scale, Supabase pricing is significantly more predictable. Firebase’s pay-as-you-go model for Firestore reads and writes can produce unexpected bills as usage grows. Supabase’s usage-based pricing beyond the free tier is transparent, with clear per-unit costs for every dimension.
Supabase Pricing in 2026 – What Upgrading To Pro Plan Actually Gets You
When the free tier is no longer enough, the Pro plan starting at $25 per month is the next step. Here is what changes.
| Feature | Free | Pro ($25/mo) |
|---|---|---|
| Active Projects | 2 | Unlimited |
| Database Size | 500 MB | 8 GB (then $0.125/GB) |
| Database Egress | 5 GB | 250 GB (then $0.09/GB) |
| File Storage | 1 GB | 100 GB (then $0.021/GB) |
| Max Upload Size | 50 MB | 500 GB |
| Monthly Active Users | 50,000 | 100,000 (then $0.00325/MAU) |
| Edge Functions | 500,000/mo | 2 million/mo (then $2/1M) |
| Realtime Connections | 200 peak | 500 peak (then $10/1,000) |
| Realtime Messages | 2M/month | 5M/month (then $2.50/1M) |
| Automatic Backups | None | Daily, 7-day retention |
| Project Pausing | After 7 days | Never |
| CDN | Basic | Smart CDN |
| Log Retention | 1 day | 7 days |
| Email Support | No | Yes |
One important billing detail: Supabase uses organisation-based billing. The $25 Pro plan covers the platform features and quotas, but compute is billed separately per project. Each project includes one Micro compute instance ($10/month), and Pro organisations receive $10 in monthly compute credits. So a Pro organisation with one project effectively costs $25 per month all in. A second project adds another $10.
The Team plan at $599 per month adds SOC2, ISO 27001, HIPAA as an add-on, SSO for the dashboard, 28-day log retention, and priority support with SLAs. This tier is designed for regulated industries and larger teams, not typical SME use cases.
How to Optimise Supabase Free Tier Project Usage
Stretching the free plan as far as possible comes down to a few consistent habits.
- Compress before upload. Images and documents should be compressed client-side before they hit Supabase Storage. This directly reduces both your storage usage and your egress when files are served.
- Use anonymous sign-ins carefully. Anonymous sign-ins count toward your MAU quota once they authenticate. For flows where users browse before signing up, consider delaying auth until it is strictly necessary.
- Keep your database lean. The 500 MB limit fills up if you store logs, audit trails, or large text fields directly in the database. Archive or delete data you no longer need, and move bulk content to storage.
- Monitor egress weekly. Check your bandwidth usage in the Supabase dashboard regularly. Unexpected egress spikes are usually caused by a missing CDN cache header or a client that is fetching more data than intended.
- Prevent project pausing proactively. If your project does not generate daily traffic yet, use an automated keep-alive workflow rather than waiting for the pause to happen. Our n8n-based Supabase keep-alive guide takes 10 minutes to set up and runs silently forever.
- Back up your data from day one. The free plan has no automatic backups. Following our automated Supabase backup guide gives you daily Postgres dumps to Cloudflare R2 at zero cost.
Is the Supabase Free Tier Right for Your Project?
The free plan is the right choice when your project fits a specific profile.
It works well for:
- MVPs and early-stage products still finding product-market fit
- Side projects and personal tools with irregular traffic
- Development and staging environments alongside a paid production instance
- Internal tools with small, known user bases
- Hackathon projects and proof-of-concept builds
It is the wrong choice for:
- Apps with real users who cannot tolerate a 30-second cold start
- Projects handling sensitive data that require compliance certifications (SOC2, HIPAA)
- Applications approaching or exceeding 500 MB of database storage
- Products that need branching, PITR, or automated backups as standard
- Any project where support response time matters
The honest answer is that the free plan is remarkably capable for its price point. Most developers who hit its limits are building something real, and that is exactly the right time to consider upgrading.
Ready to Build Smarter on Supabase?
Understanding your free tier limits is the first step. Building automation that keeps your project healthy and your costs predictable is the next.
At AI Agency Plus, we help SMEs build AI-powered workflows and automation systems that connect tools like Supabase to the rest of your tech stack. Whether you need automated data pipelines, AI agents that read and write to your Postgres database, or backend automation that keeps your free tier humming without manual oversight, we can help you build it. Explore our AI automation services and see how we work with growing teams.