Supabase vs PlanetScale Pricing After Free Tier Removal

The two most popular managed database platforms for indie developers both yanked their free tiers — but the real-world billing math tells very different stories depending on what you’re building.

Key Takeaways

• PlanetScale eliminated its free Hobby tier in April 2024, forcing solo developers onto a $39/month minimum with no grandfathered exceptions.
• Supabase kept a free tier but capped it at 500MB database storage and 2GB bandwidth — genuinely useful only for pre-launch projects with minimal traffic.
• At 10,000 monthly active users, Supabase’s Pro plan at $25/month typically covers the full workload. PlanetScale’s equivalent usage lands at $39–$59/month.
• The pricing gap isn’t just about sticker price — it’s about which model punishes growth less.
• Auth, storage, and edge functions bundled into Supabase’s $25/month plan can replace $60–$100/month in third-party services, making the total infrastructure cost comparison lopsided.

The Free Tier Collapse: What Actually Happened

PlanetScale’s April 2024 announcement hit the indie hacker community hard. The company cited infrastructure cost sustainability — according to PlanetScale’s official blog post at the time, the free tier was consuming disproportionate resources relative to conversion rates. The Hobby plan disappeared overnight. No grace period for existing users beyond a short migration window.

Supabase took a different path. It preserved its free tier but tightened the constraints. The current free plan (as of May 2026) caps you at 500MB database storage, 5GB bandwidth per month, and pauses your project after one week of inactivity. That last point matters more than most people realize. Pausing means cold-start delays and broken webhooks — real production problems, not theoretical ones.

The broader context: managed database pricing has been shifting across the board. Neon, Railway, and Turso all adjusted pricing structures between 2024 and 2026 as the “free-forever” model proved economically unworkable at scale. According to MindStudio’s 2026 analysis of backend platforms for indie hackers, the average solo developer now budgets $30–$80/month for backend infrastructure, up from under $10/month in 2022.

Free tiers are mostly dead. The real question is which platform’s paid tier fits a solo developer’s actual usage pattern.

Breaking Down Real Usage Bills

What Supabase Charges at Real Scale

Supabase’s Pro plan is $25/month. That gets you 8GB database storage, 250GB bandwidth, 50,000 monthly active users for auth, 100GB file storage, and daily backups. According to Supabase’s official pricing page, usage beyond those limits gets billed incrementally: $0.125 per GB of additional database storage, $0.09 per GB of excess bandwidth.

For a solo developer with a SaaS app at 10,000 MAU, a 2GB database, and moderate file uploads, the Pro plan typically absorbs the entire workload with no overages. DesignRevision’s pricing breakdown confirmed this pattern — their analysis of Supabase costs at 10K–100K users showed the $25 Pro tier handles most indie apps comfortably up to roughly 25,000 MAU before meaningful overage charges appear.

What PlanetScale Charges at Real Scale

PlanetScale’s current entry point is the Scaler plan at $39/month. That includes 10GB storage, 1 billion row reads, and 10 million row writes per month. The next tier, Scaler Pro, runs $59/month and adds more read replicas and higher connection limits.

Row read/write pricing is where PlanetScale’s billing gets unpredictable. A read-heavy app — think a content platform or analytics dashboard — can burn through row reads faster than storage. According to PlanetScale’s official documentation, row reads count every row scanned, not just rows returned. A poorly indexed query that scans 50,000 rows to return 10 results counts 50,000 row reads against your limit.

For solo developers, that billing model requires query-level awareness most people don’t develop until they see their first overage bill. And by then, it’s already a problem.

Side-by-Side Comparison

The auth line is the one most developers miss. Supabase bundles authentication. PlanetScale doesn’t — it’s a database-only product. Adding Clerk or Auth0 to a PlanetScale stack runs $25–$35/month on their entry paid plans. That single gap makes the total infrastructure comparison look dramatically more asymmetric once you count what you’re actually spending across the stack.

What This Means for Your Next Project

If you’re pre-launch: Supabase’s free tier still makes sense as a starting point. The inactivity pause is annoying but manageable during development. PlanetScale offers no free option at all, making it a non-starter for bootstrapped exploration.

If you’re at 1,000–15,000 MAU: Supabase Pro at $25/month almost certainly covers your needs without overages, based on DesignRevision’s usage modeling. PlanetScale at $39/month works well if your app is purely relational with predictable query patterns — but you’ll pay separately for auth, storage, and any serverless compute. Those line items add up fast.

If you’re at 50,000+ MAU: The platforms converge in cost but diverge in capability. PlanetScale’s horizontal sharding via Vitess handles write-heavy workloads at a scale that Supabase’s Postgres-based architecture approaches differently. At that point, the Supabase vs PlanetScale question becomes a technical architecture decision, not just a cost one.

One thing worth watching: Supabase has been expanding its compute add-ons aggressively through 2025–2026. The base $25 plan runs on shared compute. Adding dedicated compute starts at $10/month extra. If your app needs consistent low-latency response, that’s a line item PlanetScale’s baseline plan handles by default — so factor that in before assuming the $25 price holds.

This approach can also fail when your workload is genuinely MySQL-specific. If you’re migrating an existing app built around MySQL conventions, or your team has deep Vitess expertise, forcing a move to Supabase’s Postgres stack creates friction that no pricing advantage fully offsets.

Where This Goes Over the Next 12 Months

The managed database pricing shakeout isn’t finished. Three signals worth tracking:

Neon’s serverless Postgres continues gaining traction with a usage-based model that can undercut both platforms for low-traffic apps. According to Neon’s 2025 pricing documentation, their free tier offers 0.5GB storage without inactivity pauses — directly addressing Supabase’s biggest free-tier pain point.

PlanetScale’s enterprise pivot is real. Their product roadmap signals a move upmarket, which typically means less attention to solo developer pricing friction over time. If that trajectory continues, the entry-tier experience will likely get worse before it gets better.

Supabase’s $200M Series C (closed mid-2024) funds continued platform expansion. More bundled services mean the $25/month value proposition likely improves, not degrades. That’s a meaningful structural advantage for solo developers who want one bill covering most of their backend.

For most solo developers building full-stack apps in 2026, Supabase’s Pro tier at $25/month delivers more infrastructure per dollar than PlanetScale’s entry plan. The bundled auth alone closes the price gap. PlanetScale earns its place for teams with MySQL-specific requirements or Vitess-scale write throughput — but that’s a narrow slice of the indie hacker market.

What’s your current monthly infrastructure bill, and which platform are you running on? The answer probably tells you more about when you started building than what’s actually optimal today.

References

1. Supabase Pricing: Real Costs at 10K-100K Users
2. Best Backend Platforms for Indie Hackers in 2026 | MindStudio
3. Supabase vs PlanetScale: Which is Better in 2025

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