Supabase pricing in 2026: the real 30-day bill behind the $25 plan

Supabase advertises a $25 Pro plan. The growing SaaS in this teardown paid $333 in a real 30-day month, and only $25 of that was the plan.

This is a numbers-first breakdown of what Supabase actually costs in 2026, across four real usage shapes, with compute, monthly active users, egress, and disk itemized separately.

Quick answer

Supabase Pro starts at $25 per month in 2026, but that base number is a floor, not a ceiling (Supabase pricing, July 2026). The $25 includes a $10 compute credit, which covers exactly one Micro instance (1 GB RAM). Any production database that needs more than 1 GB of RAM adds a separate compute charge on top: $60 for Medium, $110 for Large, $210 for XL. Monthly active users over the included 100,000 bill at $0.00325 each. In the growing-SaaS cohort below, the advertised $25 was 7 percent of the real bill. The other 93 percent was compute and MAU overage.

What each plan costs in 2026

Four plans, two of them relevant to most builders. Numbers below are the published rates as of July 2026.

Two things to notice before the math. First, Team has the same usage limits as Pro. The 24x jump from $25 to $599 buys compliance and support, not capacity. Second, none of these base prices include the compute your database actually runs on beyond the smallest instance.

The compute add-on is where the bill moves

Every Supabase project runs on a compute instance. Pro and Team include $10 in monthly compute credit, which covers one Micro. Everything above Micro is billed on top of your plan.

A Micro with 1 GB of RAM is fine for a hobby project or a low-traffic app. It is not fine for a Postgres serving real concurrent traffic with a few heavy queries. Most production workloads land on Small, Medium, or Large, and that charge is separate from and on top of the $25 base.

Four real 30-day bills

Here is what four common usage shapes paid in a full month. All figures are July 2026 estimates built from the published rates, not vendor quotes.

Cohort C is the one worth staring at. The math:

• Base Pro: $25
• Large compute ($110) minus the $10 credit: $100
• 160,000 MAU, so 60,000 over the included 100,000 at $0.00325: $195
• 380 GB egress (130 over 250 at $0.09) plus 18 GB disk (10 over 8 at $0.125): about $13
• Total: $333

The advertised plan is 7 percent of that. Compute plus MAU overage is 89 percent. If you budget for "the $25 plan," you are off by a factor of 13.

The traps that catch people

The $10 credit only covers a Micro. People read "Pro includes compute" and assume their database is covered. It covers 1 GB of RAM. The moment your workload needs Small or larger, you are paying the full instance price minus $10. This is the single most common surprise in the r/Supabase pricing threads, where builders discover the plan number was never the real number.

Compute is per project. If you run a staging project and a production project, that is two compute instances. The $10 credit covers one. A dev-plus-prod split running two Micros costs $25 base plus $10 for the second Micro. Two Larges for one logical app split across staging and prod is $220 in compute alone.

Spend caps are on by default, and the knob most tutorials tell you to flip removes them. On Pro, a spend cap is enabled by default, which restricts your project when you hit included limits instead of billing overage. Turning the cap off is what enables pay-as-you-grow. That is the setting that converts Supabase from a fixed $25 into a variable bill. Flip it deliberately, not because a tutorial said to.

The Team plan is a compliance toll. The jump from Pro to Team is $574 per month for the same database size, the same MAU, and the same egress. What you buy is SOC2, ISO 27001, 14-day backups, and SLAs. Teams usually land on Team because an enterprise customer's security review demanded a compliance certificate, not because they outgrew Pro's capacity. Budget the $599 as the price of the deal you are trying to close, not as an infrastructure upgrade.

When Supabase is worth it, in numbers

Managed Postgres is a convenience purchase. The question is whether the convenience is worth the premium.

A Large instance at $110 per month runs continuously. A comparable self-managed Postgres on a rented VM can cost less on raw compute. But self-managing means you own backups, point-in-time recovery, patching, connection pooling, and the auth layer Supabase bundles in. Call it 5 to 10 engineer-hours per month. At a realistic effective rate of roughly $105 per hour, that is $525 to $1,050 of your time.

So the break-even is not about the $110. Under about five engineers, the managed premium almost always wins, because the ops hours you save are worth more than the instance you rent. Above that, once you have a platform team who would run Postgres anyway, the raw-compute savings start to matter. State it as a number: managed wins until your saved ops time is worth less than the compute premium, which for most small teams is never.

If you want the same treatment for your hosting layer, we ran a real 30-day bill for Vercel in 2026 using the identical method. And if your database is feeding an agent or LLM workflow, our true cost of running an LLM workflow calculator itemizes that side of the stack.

The honest alternatives

Supabase is not the only Postgres-shaped backend, and two competitors change the math for specific shapes.

Firebase on the Blaze plan has no flat floor at all; you pay per read, write, and GB of egress (Firebase pricing, 2026). That is cheaper at the very bottom, but it is NoSQL, not Postgres, and its egress-and-reads model can spike in ways that are hard to forecast. If you need SQL, it is not a swap.

Neon is serverless Postgres that scales compute to zero when idle (Neon pricing, 2026). For spiky or low-traffic apps, that can undercut a Supabase instance that bills whether or not anyone is connected. You give up Supabase's bundled auth, storage, and realtime, so you rebuild those or pay elsewhere.

The pattern: Supabase wins when you want the whole backend bundled and your traffic is steady. It loses when your traffic is spiky, or when you only need the database and would rather not pay for the rest. If your database is the backend for an app you are bolting an agent onto, the AgentNotebook team has a walkthrough for adding an AI agent to an existing SaaS that assumes exactly this kind of Postgres backend.

The one-line budget rule

If you are on Supabase Pro, budget three numbers, not one: the $25 base, your compute instance, and your MAU overage. For anything past a hobby project, compute plus MAU is the bill. The $25 is a rounding error you will remember and a compute charge you will forget.

Math check: in the growing-SaaS cohort, the advertised $25 plan was 7 percent of a $333 monthly bill. Compute and MAU overage were the other 89 percent. Budget the parts that move, not the number on the pricing page.