Convex Pricing 2026: The Real Monthly Bill (and the One-Index Fix)

Quick answer (July 2026)

Convex has two published tiers plus an enterprise floor. The Starter plan is free and genuinely covers a real side project. Professional is $25 per developer per month (so a 3-person team starts at $75 before any usage), and Business/Enterprise carries a $2,500 monthly minimum. The catch nobody warns you about: on top of seats, Convex meters four separate resources, and the one that surprises people is database bandwidth. Convex charges for every document your queries scan, not the ones they return, so a single missing index can quietly add tens of dollars a month. Below is the real price ladder, three worked 30-day bills, and the one-index fix that cut a sample bill by 35%.

What Convex actually charges you for

Convex is a reactive backend platform: database, server functions, file storage, search, and scheduled work in one box. That bundling is convenient, but it also means your bill is a stack of separate meters, not one number. On the paid plan you pay for:

• Developer seats at a flat $25/developer/month (this is usually the biggest line at small scale).
• Function calls (every query, mutation, and action invocation).
• Database bandwidth, billed as "database I/O", measured in GB of documents read and written.
• Database storage, file storage, action compute (GB-hours), data egress, and search storage.

Most teardowns stop at "$25 a seat". The seats are the easy part. The meters are where a predictable bill turns into a variable one, so let us put real numbers on all of them.

The Convex price ladder (July 2026)

Rates below are pulled straight from the Convex pricing page, July 2026.

Above Professional, Business and Enterprise negotiate custom limits on a $2,500/month minimum. For this article we treat the included resources as team-level allowances and add $25 per seat on top, which is how the plan reads in practice.

The meter that surprises people: database bandwidth

Here is the line that trips up teams moving off a traditional database. Convex bills database I/O by the volume of documents your queries touch. A query that scans 1,000 documents to return 10 of them bills you for reading 1,000 documents, not 10. Without the right index, Convex has to walk the table, and every document it walks counts.

This is exactly the complaint that surfaces in a widely-read r/nextjs discussion on whether Convex is really that good: "when you perform queries, Convex incurs bandwidth costs for every document it scans." It is not a gotcha, it is how usage-based database billing works. But it means your bill is a function of your indexes, not just your traffic. Two apps with identical request volume can differ several times over on the database-I/O line purely because one indexed its hot queries and the other did not.

Three worked 30-day bills

Assumptions are stated on each so you can swap your own numbers in.

Bill 1: solo side project (stays free)

One developer. About 700K function calls, 0.3 GB stored, 0.5 GB of database I/O, 12 GB-hours of action compute, 0.4 GB egress. Every meter sits under the Starter free allowance.

Bill: $0/month. Convex's free tier is not a toy. A real, low-traffic side project runs at zero, which is the honest reason it shows up in so many indie stacks.

Bill 2: small SaaS on Professional (seats dominate)

Two developers, so $50 in seats. Usage: 20M function calls (under the 25M included), 40 GB stored (under 50), 35 GB of database I/O (under 50), 200 GB-hours action compute (under 250). No meter goes over.

Bill: $50/month, all of it seats. At this scale you are paying for developers, not usage. The lesson: if you are a two-founder team, adding a third seat costs more than your entire infrastructure meter does.

Bill 3: scaling app with an unindexed hot query (the surprise)

Three developers, so $75 in seats. Now the app has real traffic and one badly-indexed query on a hot path:

• Function calls: 40M used, 15M over 25M, at $2.00/1M = $30.00
• Database bandwidth: the hot query scans about 1,000 docs per call and runs constantly, pushing 380 GB of I/O. 330 GB over 50, at $0.20/GB = $66.00
• Database storage: 70 GB, 20 over, at $0.20/GB = $4.00
• Action compute: 300 GB-hours, 50 over, at $0.30/GB-hr = $15.00
• Data egress: 60 GB, 10 over, at $0.12/GB = $1.20

Bill: about $191/month, and roughly $66 of that is pure database bandwidth from scanning documents you did not need to read.

Now add one index so the same query reads about 10 documents instead of 1,000. Database I/O drops to roughly 45 GB, back under the 50 GB included. That single change removes the entire $66 line.

Same app, indexed: about $125/month. One index cut the bill by 35%.

Convex vs Supabase vs Firebase: three meters, three different bills

The reason "which backend is cheapest" has no clean answer is that each platform counts a different thing. Run the same app on all three and the bills diverge because the meters diverge.

For context on the alternatives at the same level: Supabase starts free (500 MB database, 50,000 monthly active users) and Pro is $25/month built around a fixed compute instance plus per-MAU pricing, July 2026. Firebase Spark is free up to 50K document reads, 20K writes and 20K deletes per day, then Blaze bills per document operation, July 2026. None of these is universally cheaper. The right question is which meter matches how your app behaves: seat-heavy team on Convex, user-heavy consumer app on Supabase MAUs, chatty read/write workload on Firestore operations.

If you want the sibling teardowns with the same arithmetic, here is the Supabase pricing breakdown and the PlanetScale pricing breakdown.

Build vs buy: self-hosting Convex

Convex's backend is open source and self-hostable. Self-hosting removes seat fees and metered bandwidth entirely, but you now run and scale the backend and its database yourself. The honest crossover is the same as every build-vs-buy call: stay on Cloud while your bill is smaller than the engineering hours self-hosting would cost you.

Concretely, Bill 1 and Bill 2 above are no-brainers to keep on Cloud, because $0 and $50 buy you zero-maintenance infrastructure. Bill 3 is where you start doing the math, and even there the first move is not self-hosting, it is fixing the index. Reach for self-hosting when your metered bill is consistently in the hundreds AND you have someone who wants to own a database in production. For most teams that day never arrives.

The cheaper lever, in one line

On a seat-priced plan the instinct is to cut developers. On Convex the bigger lever early on is almost always your indexes, because the database-bandwidth meter rewards queries that read few documents and punishes queries that scan many. Add the index before you touch the seat count.