Supabase Review

The pitch that made Supabase popular is simple and mostly true: you get Firebase's speed of setup without Firebase's lock-in, because underneath it is just Postgres. Your data lives in tables you can query with SQL, dump with pg_dump and move somewhere else.

That single design decision is why a lot of teams who once reached for Firebase now reach for this instead. This review covers what you actually get at each tier and where the bill surprises people.

Supabase is an open-source backend platform built on PostgreSQL.

Every project provisions a real Postgres database, then wraps it in the services an application needs: an auto-generated REST and GraphQL API, authentication with social and enterprise providers, row-level security policies enforced in the database itself, file storage, realtime subscriptions over websockets, edge functions running Deno, and vector search for AI features.

The whole stack is open source and self-hostable, which is the practical exit route if the hosted pricing stops working for you.

You create a project and get a Postgres instance plus a dashboard with a table editor and SQL editor. Client libraries for JavaScript, Flutter, Python, Swift and others talk to the auto-generated API, so a working CRUD app needs no backend code.

Access control is the part worth understanding: instead of writing an authorisation layer, you write row-level security policies in SQL that the database enforces on every query, no matter which client sends it.

Migrations are managed through the CLI and versioned in your repo, and edge functions handle the logic that does not belong in the client.

Supabase publishes its pricing and the free tier is unusually usable. Free ($0) includes 50,000 monthly active users, a 500 MB database on shared CPU with 500 MB RAM, 5 GB egress, 1 GB file storage and a limit of 2 active projects.

The important caveat is that free projects pause after a week of inactivity, which is fine for side projects and unacceptable for anything a customer touches.

Pro is $25 per month and raises the included quotas to 100,000 monthly active users, 8 GB of disk per project, 250 GB egress and 100 GB file storage, with email support and 7-day backups.

Beyond those quotas Pro bills usage: roughly $0.00325 per extra monthly active user, $0.125 per GB of disk, $0.09 per GB of egress and $0.0213 per GB of file storage. Team is $599 per month for the same quotas plus SOC 2 and ISO 27001 compliance, priority support with SLAs, 14-day backups and project-scoped access controls.

Enterprise is custom. The practical warning: the $25 headline is a base fee, not a cap, and egress is the line that surprises image-heavy applications.

Supabase suits startups and product teams building a normal web or mobile application on relational data, particularly anyone who values SQL and wants an exit path. It is excellent for AI products, since pgvector lives in the same database as everything else.

It is also a strong choice for solo developers, because the free tier genuinely supports a real prototype.

It is a weaker fit for applications with unpredictable heavy egress on a tight budget, for teams needing hard multi-region write latency guarantees, and for organisations that require SOC 2 without paying $599 a month, since compliance sits on the Team tier.