Supabase vs PlanetScale Free Tier: Row Limits and Migration

The database hosting market shifted hard in 2024. PlanetScale killed its free tier in March 2024, and the developer fallout was immediate — thousands of projects scrambling for alternatives, with Supabase absorbing the bulk of that migration traffic. Two years later, the supabase vs planetscale free tier row limit real project migration experience is still shaping how teams pick their backend stack.

Database costs are the second-largest line item for most early-stage SaaS products, behind compute. Getting this decision wrong at launch means painful migrations at exactly the wrong moment — when you’ve got users to retain and features to ship.

The argument here is direct: for most indie developers and small teams, Supabase’s free tier is structurally better for real projects — but it comes with PostgreSQL-specific tradeoffs that can surprise teams used to MySQL-flavored PlanetScale.

Key Takeaways

• PlanetScale permanently removed its free Hobby tier in March 2024, forcing thousands of active projects to either pay $39/month or migrate immediately.
• Supabase’s free tier offers 500MB database storage and up to 50,000 monthly active users with no hard row limits, making it more viable for early-stage projects with growing datasets.
• Migration from PlanetScale to Supabase requires schema rewrites because PlanetScale uses Vitess (MySQL-compatible) while Supabase runs PostgreSQL — they’re not drop-in compatible.
• For projects under 500MB data with simple relational models, Supabase free tier handles real production workloads; beyond that, the $25/month Pro plan is the next practical step.
• Teams choosing between these platforms in 2026 should weigh storage limits over row limits — rows are cheap, storage is where the actual ceiling hits.

The Free Tier Collapse That Changed Developer Defaults

PlanetScale launched its free Hobby tier around 2022 as a growth play. It was genuinely generous: 5GB storage, 1 billion row reads per month, 10 million row writes. For a side project or early SaaS, that’s plenty of headroom. Developers built on it. Some shipped real products.

Then, in February 2024, PlanetScale announced the Hobby tier was ending. Projects had roughly 30 days to migrate or start paying. According to PlanetScale’s own announcement blog post, the company cited infrastructure cost sustainability as the driver. The minimum paid plan at the time jumped to $39/month — a real number for anyone pre-revenue.

The migration surge to Supabase was measurable. Supabase co-founder Paul Copplestone noted on X (formerly Twitter) in early 2024 that signups hit record highs during the PlanetScale announcement window. Supabase’s free tier remained intact: 500MB storage, 2 CPU cores (shared), 50,000 monthly active users, with pausing for inactive projects after one week of inactivity.

That inactivity pause is the catch most developers hit first. If nobody touches your project for 7 days on the free tier, Supabase pauses the database. It resumes on next request, but cold-start latency can hit 3-5 seconds. For a demo or low-traffic app, that’s annoying but manageable. For anything with regular users, it’s a real problem.

The Actual Row Limit Question

The supabase vs planetscale free tier row limit real project migration experience question gets Googled constantly because developers are scared of hitting invisible walls. The answer is less dramatic than expected.

Supabase doesn’t enforce a hard row count limit on free tier. The constraint is storage: 500MB. Depending on your schema and average row size, that could mean 500,000 rows or 5 million rows. A users table with basic profile data typically runs 1-2KB per row — so 500MB gets you roughly 250,000-500,000 users before hitting the ceiling. A heavily JSON-bloated schema? Much less.

PlanetScale’s old free tier had 1 billion row reads per month. That’s a reads metric, not a storage metric — a completely different constraint. Teams optimized queries to stay under read limits. Supabase requires optimizing for storage size. These are genuinely different performance pressures, and conflating them is where most pre-migration planning goes wrong.

Schema Compatibility: The Actual Migration Blocker

PlanetScale runs on Vitess, which is MySQL-compatible. Supabase runs PostgreSQL. They share SQL syntax in broad strokes but differ in ways that wreck automated migrations:

• PlanetScale doesn’t support foreign key constraints (Vitess limitation). Supabase does, and PostgreSQL developers lean on them.
• Data types diverge: PlanetScale uses TINYINT(1) for booleans; PostgreSQL uses native BOOLEAN.
• Auto-increment syntax differs: MySQL uses AUTO_INCREMENT, PostgreSQL uses SERIAL or BIGSERIAL.
• JSON handling: Both support JSON columns, but PostgreSQL’s JSONB indexing is more capable than MySQL’s JSON type.

A real migration means rewriting CREATE TABLE statements, adjusting ORM configurations (Prisma, Drizzle, TypeORM all handle this differently), and re-testing query performance from scratch. According to the Leanware engineering comparison, teams typically spend 3-5 days on a schema migration for a mid-complexity app — longer if the codebase has raw SQL scattered across services.

Feature Set Comparison

Supabase bundles auth, storage, and edge functions into one platform. PlanetScale is database-only — you’d pay separately for auth (Auth0, Clerk) and file storage (S3, Cloudflare R2). For small teams, that bundling saves real money and reduces vendor sprawl.

What the Migration Experience Actually Looks Like

The migration experience breaks into two distinct scenarios based on project maturity.

Scenario 1 — New project (greenfield): Starting on Supabase free tier in 2026 makes strong sense for most projects. The 500MB limit is workable for early-stage apps. Auth is included. The dashboard is genuinely good. And the $25/month Pro upgrade path is cheaper than PlanetScale’s $39 floor. The main thing to watch: design your schema lean from day one, and monitor storage usage weekly once you cross 50,000 rows.

Scenario 2 — Migrating from PlanetScale (existing project): Budget a week minimum. Export your PlanetScale schema, rewrite it for PostgreSQL syntax, run a data export via PlanetScale’s dump tool, then import with psql. Test every query your ORM generates — especially anything using MySQL-specific functions like GROUP_CONCAT (becomes STRING_AGG in PostgreSQL). The House of Loops 2025 database tools analysis specifically flags this syntax gap as the most common migration failure point.

This approach can fail when codebases have raw SQL strings buried across multiple services. Prisma users often discover their schema.prisma file needs the provider switched from mysql to postgresql, plus column type adjustments throughout. Drizzle ORM handles this more cleanly through its migration toolkit, but still requires manual review of any raw query strings. Neither path is automatic. Anyone expecting a one-click export-import is going to hit a wall fast.

One pattern worth tracking: Supabase has been expanding its free tier storage cap incrementally. There’s active community discussion (tracked in Supabase’s GitHub issues) about raising the 500MB ceiling or offering a “sleep-exempt” option for free projects with verified activity thresholds. Worth watching in Q3-Q4 2026.

What the Data Recommends

The database-as-a-service market consolidation continues. PlanetScale’s free tier removal wasn’t an isolated event — it signaled that no-margin free infrastructure isn’t sustainable at scale. Supabase’s free tier survives because the company’s business model depends on developer top-of-funnel more heavily than PlanetScale’s enterprise-focused strategy does. That dynamic could shift. But for now, the math still favors Supabase for early-stage teams.

Key conclusions from the real project migration data:

• Row limits aren’t the real constraint. Storage is. Design schemas accordingly.
• Migration cost is real. The MySQL-to-PostgreSQL gap takes days, not hours, for any app past prototype stage.
• Supabase’s bundle is unbeatable at free tier. Auth + storage + realtime + edge functions in one platform changes the math significantly.
• PlanetScale’s branching feature is genuinely better for team workflows. If you need database branching per PR, PlanetScale’s Scaler plan earns its cost for teams of three or more.

The bottom line: if you’re starting fresh in 2026 or migrating from PlanetScale, Supabase free tier handles real production workloads up to roughly 300,000-500,000 rows depending on schema density. The $25/month Pro jump is the right pressure valve when you outgrow it.

What’s your current storage usage pattern — are you hitting the 500MB ceiling before the row count, or the other way around? That single answer determines which platform fits your next 12 months.

References

1. Supabase vs PlanetScale: Which is Better in 2025
2. Supabase vs Firebase vs PlanetScale: Which Backend-as-a-Service is Right for Your Budget?
3. Best Database Tools 2025: Supabase vs Firebase vs PlanetScale [2025] | House of Loops

Photo by Ales Nesetril on Unsplash