As part of their first launch week, Supabase team has announced their pricing model.

We will be comparing the free and pay as you go tier today in this article to see the direct comparison of Supabase and Firebase in terms of pricing.

Since Firebase offers two databases, I have chosen Cloud Firestore to be the one to be compared to Supabase database, as Cloud Firestore is more widely used than realtime database these days.

Free tier

First, let's look at the free tier comparison:

For me, free tier is not that important, because it would be mostly used only for testing or very small scale personal projects. Both products are sufficient enough to get up and running without paying a penny.

With that being said, Firebase does have an advantage here in all products except API call limits for database. The difference in file storage pricing is the most significant, when building file storage intensive apps, it might be something to keep in mind.

Pay As You Go

Now let's look at what really matters, the pay as you go plan:

Note that Supabase has a $25 base payment where as Firebase is free if your usage is within their free tier.

Firebase has more complex pricing structure, so it might be hard to compare numbers at first glance.

Ignoring the base payment, Supabase seems cheaper given that they have unlimited API calls. Being a Firebase developer, I always had to make sure I am not making too many API calls so that I do not receive a crazy huge bill. Not anymore with Supabase. Even with the database storage alone, they are cheaper, but Firebase will charge you for every API calls you make. In addition to that, Cloud Firestore is a NoSQL database, which means you probably want to denormalize your data inside your database, which means just more cost in database storage.

Auth is a clear tie as they both offer unlimited usage.

For storage, again Supabase is the winner here, as they have cheaper price for both storing and transferring data. Especially the difference in data transfer fee is significant, which is great news for me who is about to launch a video sharing app.

Conclusion

To me, and for most people, pay as you go plan is pretty much the only thing that matters. I was not only relieved, but super excited that using Supabase is going to reduce my monthly server cost for my applications. There are so many reasons why you should be using Supabase already, but this pricing model is just another reason why you should use Supabase.

If you want to read more about how Supabase team came up with this pricing model, here is an blog post they published about the thoughts they put into it.

Reference:

Firebase pricing
Supabase pricing

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