Why Supabase can get expensive, and how to pay less for the same backend

“25 dollars a month” sounds great — until the first invoice for a production app arrives. The Supabase Pro plan is a starting point, and the real cost is made up of several layers.

Where the costs come from

1. Compute. The plan includes a credit for the smallest instance. When the database needs 4 GB of RAM, you pay separately for each project — staging included.
2. Egress. Transfer above the limit is billed per GB. Apps with images or large API responses feel it the most.
3. MAU. Once you exceed the monthly active user limit, you pay for every additional user.
4. Add-ons. PITR, a custom domain, IPv4, read replicas — each is a separate line item.
5. Exchange rate and VAT. An invoice in USD with the reverse charge means extra accounting work and currency risk.

Example: a B2B SaaS with three environments

Item	Supabase (estimate)	HostBase
Plan	25 USD	49 PLN
Prod — 4 GB instance	~110 USD	99 PLN
Staging — 1 GB instance	~10 USD	19 PLN
Dev — smallest	~10 USD	0 PLN
PITR 7 days	~100 USD	included in Team
Total / month	~255 USD (~1000 PLN)	167–399 PLN

Supabase prices are approximate and change over time — always check the current price list. Our prices are on the Pricing page.

How to pay less — whatever the provider

• Pause dev and preview environments when nobody is working on them (with us it is one API call or one command for an MCP agent).
• Match the instance to the real load — check pg_stat_statements before buying a bigger machine. Often an index is missing, not RAM.
• Serve images through transformations and a CDN instead of originals.
• Use a pooler in serverless functions so you do not need a larger instance just for the connection limit.

-- the 10 most expensive queries
select query, calls, round(total_exec_time) as total_ms, round(mean_exec_time, 1) as mean_ms
from pg_stat_statements
order by total_exec_time desc
limit 10;

Want to compare your bill? Send us your Supabase invoice — we will prepare a quote and a migration plan.