Supabase vs Firebase
Supabase and Firebase priced side by side at 1,000, 10,000 and 100,000 users — and the point above which Firebase stops publishing a rate at all.
| Service | Plan at 10,000 users | 1,000 users | 10,000 users | 100,000 users |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SupabasePostgres with auth, storage and realtime bolted on. | Pro3 Aug 2026 | $25 | $25 | $188 |
| FirebaseGoogle's document store, auth and functions on one bill. | Blaze3 Aug 2026 | $0 | not published | not published |
| NeonServerless Postgres that scales compute to zero and branches like git. | Launch3 Aug 2026 | $77 | $77 | $241 |
| ConvexReactive TypeScript backend — database, functions and realtime in one. | Professional3 Aug 2026 | $25 | $55 | $415 |
Change any of those assumptions in the calculator.
Where this actually starts
Both give you a database, authentication, file storage and serverless functions behind one SDK, and both have a free tier that will carry a side project indefinitely. The decision is not really about features.
It is about two things: whether you want SQL you can query and take with you, and whether you can find out in advance what the thing will cost.
What actually separates them
Postgres against a document store
Supabase is Postgres. You can write joins, run migrations, connect any Postgres client, and move the whole database somewhere else. Firestore is a document store with a query model that forbids most joins and requires an index for nearly every access pattern — which is fast and scales beautifully, right up until the day a product manager asks a question the indexes do not answer.
One of them will quote you a price at scale
Supabase publishes $0.00325 per monthly active user above the 100,000 included on Pro. Firebase publishes its free quota — 50,000 monthly active users — and then defers to "Google Cloud pricing" without a figure. The table above shows this: Firebase has no total at 100,000 users, and that is not a gap in this catalogue, it is a gap on the pricing page.
The exit
Supabase is open source and self-hostable, so the threat of leaving is credible and the price stays honest partly because of that. Firebase is not, and Google has a long record of what happens to products it loses interest in.
Where Firebase still wins
Offline sync on mobile. The Firestore client caches and reconciles writes made while a device is offline, and nothing in the Postgres world does that as well out of the box. If you are shipping a mobile app that has to work on a train, that single feature can outweigh everything above.
Which to pick
| If | Then |
|---|---|
| You are building on the web and expect to grow past a free tier | Supabase — a per-user rate you can multiply out beats a rate you have to ask for. |
| You need offline-first mobile sync | Firebase — nothing else does this as well, and the pricing opacity is the price of it. |
| You want Postgres but nothing else bundled | Neon — scale-to-zero compute makes an idle app genuinely cheap. |
Questions
Is Supabase actually cheaper than Firebase?
At small scale both are free. At 100,000 users the honest answer is that nobody can tell you, because Firebase does not publish a per-user rate above its free quota. Supabase can be worked out to the cent from published figures, which is a different kind of advantage than being cheaper.
Can I use Supabase auth without Supabase the database?
Not usefully — Supabase Auth writes into the Postgres instance it comes with. If you want auth separate from your database, that is the case for Clerk or Better Auth instead.
