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:
| Supabase | Firebase | |
|---|---|---|
| Database | 500 MB of storage Unlimited API calls |
1 GiB of storage Network egress 10GiB/month Document writes 20K/day Document reads 50K/day Document deletes 20K/day |
| Auth | Up to 10,000 Users | Unlimited |
| File Storage | Storage up to 1 GB Transfer limits up to 2 GB/month |
Storage up to 5 GB Transfer limits up to 1 GB/day Upload operations 20K/day Download operations 50K/day |
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:
| Supabase | Firebase | |
|---|---|---|
| Database | $0.125 per GB of storage Unlimited API calls |
$0.18/GiB Network egress Document writes $0.18/100K Document reads $0.06/100K Document deletes $0.02/100K |
| Auth | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| File Storage | Data stored $0.021 per GB Data trannsfer $0.07/GB |
Data stored $0.026/GB GB downloaded $0.12/GB Upload operations $0.05/10k Download operations $0.004/10k |
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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Top comments (9)
One thing I must consider Supabase here is Firestore's querying abilities are very primitive, so more complicated filtering, sorting, or merging of data MUST be done client-side. It means you must pay for data you don't want to query.
Do we have any comparison in performance, scaling between Supabase and firebase?
In terms of scalability, I would say relational databases are far more scalable than NoSQL database.
Here is an article comparing Supabase and Firebase
blog.logrocket.com/firebase-vs-sup...
That is a false statement.
NoSQL databases can afford horizontal scaling whereas relational databases cannot. The main benefit of NoSQL databases is better scalability! Queries in NoSQL databases are ridiculously fast too.
Also, relational databases are far more resistant to change down the road than NoSQL databases.
The question is whether most apps actually need the added scalability with today's computing power considered; not whether there is a chance a relational database is more scalable than a NoSQL database.
I’m not asking compare the speed of sql vs nosql. What I mean is compare the speed in large scale between Firebase and Supabase which many thing will effect that, not just because it build from sql or nosql
a great write up, Tyler! Thanks for this
Great! I'm so unhappy with firebase storage pricing right now. Just recently got a surprise bill from google. Will definitely checkout supabase
Thanks for giving a good idea on pricing.
Which app are you launching?
My pleasure. I made an app called Spot! You can find out more about it here!