Firebase Pricing 2026: Spark vs Blaze and Real Bills

Firebase has two plans. Spark is free with no payment method, and Blaze is pay as you go, with Spark's no-cost quotas still included. On Blaze, Firestore reads cost $0.03 per 100,000 after 50,000 free a day, Cloud Functions invocations $0.40 per million after 2M free a month. Rates read on Firebase's and Google Cloud's pricing pages, October 2026.

So there is no monthly fee to compare, only usage. A small app can stay at $0 on Blaze for as long as it stays under quota, and a busy one can still spend less than a flat SaaS plan. The risk sits elsewhere: Firestore bills every document read, there is no spend cap for the database, and a single chatty listener can multiply the bill without any change in traffic.

Toolradar data: the low-code backend ranking on Toolradar, the software directory we run, evaluated 114 tools as of October 2026, and Firebase on Toolradar holds the directory record. Our Firebase review covers whether the product fits; this page stays on the bill.

Firebase-side quotas and rates come from the Firebase pricing page. Firestore per-operation rates come from the Firestore pricing page for the Iowa (us-central1) location, and MAU rates from Identity Platform pricing. All read October 19, 2026.

How much does Firebase cost in 2026?

For most projects the honest answer is "nothing until it has users", because Spark charges nothing and needs no card. Blaze also charges nothing until you pass the same free quotas, which Firebase calculates daily for most products. The bill starts when a counter crosses its line, and each service has its own counter.

A handful of products are free on both plans with no metering at all: A/B Testing, Analytics, App Distribution, Cloud Messaging, Crashlytics, In-App Messaging and Performance Monitoring. Push notifications and crash reports never appear on a Firebase invoice, which is part of why mobile teams start here.

Eligible new Blaze accounts can also get $300 in free credit, per Firebase's pricing page. Treat it as a buffer for your first months of real traffic, not as a reason to skip budget alerts.

Spark vs Blaze: what the free plan cannot do

Spark is not a smaller Blaze. Several services are unavailable on it, and that, more than the quotas, is what forces most upgrades.

• No Cloud Functions. Spark lists Functions as not applicable, so any server-side logic, webhook or scheduled job needs Blaze.
• No Cloud Storage. File uploads are a Blaze feature; the pricing table lists Spark as not applicable for every Storage row.
• No App Hosting. Firebase's newer hosting for server-rendered frameworks is Blaze only. Classic Hosting stays on Spark, with 10 GB of storage and 360 MB of transfer a day.
• Realtime Database capped at 100 connections. Blaze raises that to 200K per database and allows several databases per project.
• SQL Connect on a trial. Spark gets a 3-month no-cost Cloud SQL trial; if the project has not moved to Blaze by the end, the instance is archived, then deleted 90 days later.

The practical rule: a prototype with Firestore, Auth and static Hosting lives happily on Spark. The day you add file uploads or a single backend function, you are on Blaze, and the questions become rates and caps.

The Blaze rates that actually move a bill

Firestore is the line to watch. In the Iowa location, Google lists reads at $0.03 per 100,000 documents, writes at $0.09 per 100,000 and deletes at $0.01 per 100,000, after the daily free quota. Named databases get no free quota at all, so a second database in the same project bills from the first read.

Reads are cheap one by one and expensive in bulk, because Firestore counts every document a query returns. A list screen that loads 50 documents costs 50 reads each time it opens. A count() query is billed one read per batch of up to 1,000 index entries, which is the cheaper way to show totals.

Cloud Functions bills in three meters: invocations, GB-seconds and CPU-seconds, with 2M invocations, 400K GB-seconds and 200K CPU-seconds free each month on Blaze. Outbound networking is free to 5 GB a month, then $0.12 per GB, and Cloud Build minutes are free to 120 a day, then $0.003 a minute. For most apps the invocation count is the smallest of these lines.

Realtime Database is priced on storage and downloads rather than operations, at $5 per GB stored and $1 per GB downloaded on Blaze. That inverts the Firestore logic: many small reads are cheap, a large dataset is not.

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Worked bills: three apps on Blaze

We priced three hypothetical apps on Blaze, using the free quotas and us-central1 rates above, a 30-day month, and only Firestore, Functions and Hosting transfer. Storage, Auth upgrades and Google Cloud extras are left out. The arithmetic is ours; the rates are Google's.

The growing app's $48.99 breaks down to $35.55 of reads, $4.86 of writes, $7.38 of Hosting transfer and $1.20 of Functions. Reads are more than 70% of the bill even with a modest 200 reads per user per day.

The third row is the Firebase horror story in miniature. Nothing about the users changed; one screen re-subscribes to a large collection on every render, and the read line alone rises to $359.55. That is why the single most effective cost control on Firebase is in your code: paginate queries, cache with the client SDK, and use count() instead of fetching documents to count them.

Can you cap a Firebase bill?

Only partly, and this is the detail to settle before you add a card. Firebase offers two kinds of budget. Alerts-only budgets send email at thresholds and, in Firebase's words, do not pause services. Spend cap budgets pause a service for the rest of the month when it reaches 100% of its budget.

Spend caps cover only four services: Firebase AI Logic, App Hosting, Cloud Functions for Firebase and Firebase Extensions. Firestore, Realtime Database, Storage and Hosting cannot be capped this way. For those, the only hard stop Firebase documents is using budget notifications to disable billing on the project programmatically, which takes the whole app down with it.

So the realistic protection is layered: an alerts-only budget (the Blaze upgrade prompts you to create one), spend caps on Functions and AI Logic, and the read discipline above. If you need a hard monthly ceiling on the database itself, Firebase does not offer one, and a fixed-fee backend is the alternative to price.

Firebase vs Supabase on price

Supabase sells a flat plan where Firebase sells meters. Supabase's pricing page lists Pro at $25 a month, with 100,000 monthly active users included and $0.00325 per MAU after that, against 50,000 on its Free plan.

On authentication, the gap is sharp. Firebase's pricing table lists email, social and other sign-in methods as included on both plans; MAU pricing applies when you upgrade to Authentication with Identity Platform, where 80,000 MAUs would cost $165 a month at the first paid tier (our arithmetic). The same 80,000 users sit inside Supabase Pro's included quota.

On data, Firebase can be cheaper. The growing app above pays less than $50 a month on Blaze, and a read-light app pays nothing, while Supabase Pro is a fixed fee with compute billed on top. The trade-off is predictability: Supabase's bill moves with compute size, Firebase's moves with your query patterns. Our Supabase pricing page details that model, and Supabase vs Firebase compares the products.

For the full field, see Firebase alternatives, the best backend for mobile apps and the best backend as a service rankings, and our free cloud tiers compared page. Supabase on Toolradar has its directory record, and our Supabase review weighs the product itself.

What changed in Firebase pricing recently

Remote Config fetches became billable on September 1, 2026. Up to 100,000 fetch requests a day per project stay free; above that Firebase charges $0.06 per 10,000 requests up to 10M a day, and $0.01 per 10,000 beyond. An app that fetches config on every launch at scale should check this line now.

App Hosting's outgoing bandwidth has been billed since August 1, 2025: free up to 10 GiB a month, then $0.20 per GiB uncached and $0.15 per GiB cached. Its storage is free to 5 GB, then $0.10 per GB.

FAQ

How much does Firebase cost per month?

Firebase has no monthly fee. Spark is free, and Blaze charges only for usage above the same free quotas, so many small apps pay $0. On Blaze, Firestore reads cost $0.03 per 100,000 in us-central1 after 50,000 free a day, and our worked example of a 20,000-daily-user app comes to about $49 a month.

Is Firebase free?

Yes, on the Spark plan, with no payment method needed. Spark includes Firestore (50,000 reads and 20,000 writes a day, 1 GiB stored), Authentication, Hosting and the unmetered products such as Analytics and Crashlytics. It excludes Cloud Functions, Cloud Storage and App Hosting.

When should I upgrade from Spark to Blaze?

When you need Cloud Functions, Cloud Storage, App Hosting, more than 100 Realtime Database connections, or quota above Spark's daily limits. Blaze keeps Spark's free quotas, so upgrading does not create a bill by itself.

Can I set a spending limit on Firebase?

Partly. Spend cap budgets pause AI Logic, App Hosting, Cloud Functions and Extensions at 100% of budget. Firestore, Realtime Database, Storage and Hosting only support alert budgets, which do not pause anything, so code-level read control is the main defense.

Why is my Firestore bill so high?

Firestore bills each document a query returns, so listeners on large collections, unpaginated lists and repeated re-subscriptions multiply reads without more users. In our worked example, a listener that rereads ten times as much raises the read line from $35.55 to $359.55 a month.

Is Firebase cheaper than Supabase?

For read-light apps, often yes, because Blaze can cost $0 while Supabase Pro is a fixed monthly fee. For apps with many users on Identity Platform, or heavy read patterns, Supabase's included 100,000 MAUs and flat pricing can be cheaper and easier to forecast.

Louis Corneloup, founder of Dupple and Toolradar, prepared this price breakdown for developers deciding when Firebase starts to cost money. We read the Firebase pricing page, the Firestore pricing page, Identity Platform pricing, Firebase's guide to avoiding surprise bills and the Supabase pricing page on October 19, 2026. Worked bills and the MAU total are our arithmetic on those published rates. Publishing rules for this site are on the Devshot about page. We recheck vendor prices monthly.

Cite this: Devshot, "Firebase Pricing 2026: Spark vs Blaze and Real Bills", November 2026.

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