Database

Supabase vs Neon vs Firebase

Supabase, Neon, Firebase side by side: price, free tier, who each one fits and when to skip it.

Item	Supabase	Neon	Firebase
What it does	Postgres database with login, file storage, edge functions and realtime in one project.	Serverless Postgres that scales to zero and lets you branch the database like code.	Google's app platform: login, Firestore database, file storage and free push notifications (FCM).
Best for	A solo founder who wants login, database and uploads in one place, with a region close to their users so the app feels fast.	A founder with several side projects, or one database per customer, who only wants to pay for the hours the database is actually running.	A mobile-first app for a mostly Android audience that needs push notifications and login working within the week.
Skip it if	You plan to leave a free project idle while you validate, since free projects get paused after a week without activity.	You want database, login and file storage in one mature package: Neon's login and storage are much newer than its Postgres.	Your SaaS runs on relational data like charges, plans and reports that you will want to query with SQL.
Setup	Needs a developer. Login and a first table in an afternoon; access rules and email setup take another day or two.	Needs a developer. A database ready to connect in minutes; wiring it into the app takes an afternoon.	Needs a developer. Login and push on a test app in a day; security rules and data modeling take most of a week.
Price	Free, then Pro from $25/month plus usage	Free; Launch is pay-as-you-go with no minimum	Free Spark plan, then pay-as-you-go (Blaze)
What it costs in practice	A SaaS with 2,000 monthly active users and a 3 GB database outgrows the free 500 MB, so it goes to Pro: $25/month, which already covers one Micro server, 100k users, 8 GB of disk and 250 GB of egress. Add $10 for a custom domain on login and you're at about $35/month (estimate, in dollars).	A SaaS with 2,000 monthly active users and a 3 GB database needs the Launch plan (free is 1 GB). On the smallest size (0.25 CU) running about 12 hours a day: 0.25 × 365 hours × $0.106 ≈ $10, plus 3 GB × $0.35 ≈ $1. About $11/month; kept on 24 hours a day it's about $20 (estimate).	With 2,000 monthly users, login and push are free. If each user loads 200 documents a day, that's 400k reads a day, about 12 million a month. The free 50k a day covers about 1.5 million; the other 10.5 million at $0.03 per 100k (us-central1) cost about $3/month on Blaze (estimate; the price varies by region).
Free plan	2 projects, 50k monthly users, 500 MB database and 1 GB of files; paused after a week idle.	100 projects, 1 GB per project and 100 compute hours per project each month.	Spark plan: 50k monthly users, 1 GiB Firestore with daily read/write limits, push at no cost.
Free tier	50k MAU, 500 MB DB, 1 GB files	1 GB and 100 CU-hours per project	Push free; 50k MAU; 1 GiB Firestore
First paid plan	Free (Pro: $25/mo, 100k MAU included)	Launch: $0.106/CU-hour + $0.35/GB	Free on Spark (50k MAU included)
Database type	Postgres	Serverless Postgres	NoSQL documents (Firestore)
Open source	Yes: yes	Yes: yes	No: no
Before you build	Free projects are paused after one week without activity, and you get only 2 free projects across all your organizations. The built-in email only reaches members of your Supabase team, at about 2 emails an hour. Real users get no confirmation or reset email until you plug in your own SMTP. Phone login doesn't send SMS by itself: you open an account with Twilio, MessageBird or Vonage and pay them per message. The free plan has no automatic backups; Pro keeps 7 days, and point-in-time restore is an add-on of about $100/month. The Pro fee is per organization, but each project runs its own server: every extra project adds compute (Micro is $10/month) on top.	On the free plan the database always sleeps after 5 minutes idle, and you can't turn that off; the next query wakes it in a few hundred milliseconds. When a free project runs out of its 100 compute hours, the database is suspended until the next month or until you upgrade. Past 1 GB on a free project, inserts and updates start failing; your data is kept, but the app stops saving. The free plan only lets you restore to a point in the last 6 hours; a mistake noticed the next day can't be undone there.	Since February 3, 2026, Cloud Storage requires the Blaze plan, even for the default bucket. On Spark, uploads and downloads fail until you add a card. Budget alerts don't stop anything: they only send email. On Blaze, a loop of reads keeps being billed until you notice. Firestore bills every document a query returns, and every change a live listener receives counts as a new read, so a busy list screen adds up fast. Phone (SMS) login only works on Blaze and is billed per SMS sent, on top of the free 50k users. The database location is permanent: pick a far-away region by mistake and your users stay farther from their data for good.
Price checked	Checked on Oct 28, 2026 · official pricing	Checked on Oct 28, 2026 · official pricing	Checked on Oct 28, 2026 · official pricing

Prices are read from each official pricing page on the date shown and can change. Always confirm before signing up.

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