Supabase vs Firebase vs Neon: free tiers and what happens after (2026)

The free tiers are where this comparison actually gets decided, more than the paid pricing does — and each of the three fails a hobby project in a different, specific way.

Supabase's free project pauses after seven days of inactivity. Fine for something you're actively building, annoying for the side project you check on once a month, which then greets you with a "resume this project" button instead of just working. Neon avoids that entirely — its free tier scales to zero and resumes instantly rather than sitting paused, though you're capped on branches and compute if you push it. Firebase's free Spark plan quietly lost Cloud Storage back in February; if your app needs to store files rather than just query a database, that's no longer part of the deal, full stop.

| | Database / storage | Auth | Catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Supabase | 500 MB DB, 1 GB files, 2 projects | 50,000 MAU | pauses after 7 days idle |
| Neon | 0.5 GB per project, ~100 projects | bring your own | branch/compute limits on free |
| Firebase (Spark) | Firestore free quota | generous | Cloud Storage removed, Feb 2026 |

Once you're paying, Supabase Pro is a flat $25/month per project — predictable, easy to budget, and it buys 100k MAU, 8 GB of database and 100 GB of file storage in one bundle. Neon's Launch tier is usage-based instead, typically landing around $15–19/month for a normal workload, which can be cheaper or more expensive than Supabase depending on how spiky your traffic actually is. Firebase has no flat fee at all on Blaze — pure pay-as-you-go, which is genuinely the cheapest option at very low, steady traffic and the least predictable option the moment traffic isn't steady.

The bigger shift this year is what each product is *for*, not what it costs. Neon leaned harder into being the best pure-Postgres experience — branching a database the way you'd branch git, instant resume, nothing else bundled in — and its acquisition by Databricks this year signals that specialization is the long-term bet, not a detour. Supabase kept building outward: Postgres, auth, storage, realtime and edge functions all under one roof, open source, the closest thing to a Firebase replacement that isn't Firebase. Firebase itself quietly shrank — Firebase Studio was discontinued in March, on top of the storage change in February.

If you're starting something new and want the most functionality without gluing services together yourself, Supabase is the easiest starting point. Pick Neon specifically when what you want is *just* excellent Postgres and you're happy to bring your own auth. Firebase still makes sense for a tiny-traffic mobile app that's fine living inside Firestore's document model — just go in aware that the free tier isn't quite what it used to be.