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ReviewsIs Supabase actually free?
How free76/100
Value8/10
How these scores work
Free Score (0–100) follows a fixed rubric: cards up front, auto-billing, hard time cutoffs, withheld core features, and paying with your data or attention all deduct points. 90–100 truly free · 70–89 free forever · 45–69 squeezed · 15–44 trial mechanics · under 15 fake or gone. Value (0–10) is editorial: real-world worth of the free offering measured against its paid equivalent. Full rubric on the methodology page.
Yes — a genuinely usable free tier with a real Postgres database, no card required. The limits that matter are two active projects and a pause after a week of inactivity.
What it’s worth
A managed Postgres instance with auth and storage is otherwise $15–25/month at the low end.
What you get free
- A real hosted Postgres database with an auto-generated API
- Authentication, file storage and realtime subscriptions
- Unlimited API requests
- Two active projects at once
In practice: a full backend for prototypes and small tools, free, provided nothing depends on it being awake.
Drawbacks
- Idle projects pause, which rules out low-traffic production use
- Only two active projects
- No automatic backups on the free plan
Also paywalled
- More than two active projects
- Databases beyond the free size and no idle pausing
- Daily backups, log retention and support
Free facts
| Verdict | Free Forever |
| Card required | No |
| Auto-bills | — |
| Account | Required |
| Limits | 2 active projects; 500MB database; pauses after a week idle |
| The real cost | An account, and the pausing rule. No card for the free plan. |
The catch
Free projects pause after about a week with no activity. Nothing is deleted and you can wake it up, but a side project you visit monthly will greet you asleep — and so will your users.
The smart play
- Anything with real users needs the paid tier — the pause rule alone makes free unsuitable for production
- Two active projects is the real ceiling; archive rather than accumulate
- Take your own backups on free — daily backups are a paid feature
More info — tap to expand
The pause rule, plainly
A week without activity and the project suspends. You can restore it from the dashboard and the data is intact, but the first visitor after a quiet week meets an error rather than your app. For learning, prototyping and internal tools that's fine. For anything a stranger might load, it isn't.
Last checked: July 2026 · Verdict: Free Forever — a real permanent free plan. signup and fair limits — but no clock and no card.
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