Backend as a Service Providers Compared in 2026
Vasim Gujrati
Solutions Architect, AI & Platforms, Unico Connect
In this article
Most backend as a service comparisons rank platforms without pricing any of them, which is the one thing a buyer actually needs. This one does the opposite. Every price and limit below was read from the vendor own pricing or docs page on 1 September 2026 and checked a second time before publishing, and where a vendor publishes nothing we say so rather than estimating. If you want the conceptual version first, our backend as a service guide covers what BaaS is and when it fits.
Quick Answer
There is no best backend as a service provider, but there is a cheapest way to be wrong. Supabase Pro starts at 25 dollars per month and bills predictable resource overages. Firebase has no monthly floor at all and bills per document read, which is why it produces both the smallest bills at low traffic and the alarming ones at scale. Xano starts at 99 dollars per month billed monthly. Convex, Appwrite and Nhost sit in between with managed Postgres or their own engines, and PocketBase is a single binary you host yourself for the cost of a server. Pick by which unit you are billed on, not by the headline price, because the billing unit decides whether your bill grows with users, with storage, or with queries.
Key Takeaways
- The billing unit matters more than the price. Supabase bills resources, so the bill tracks how much data and traffic you have. Firestore bills per document read, so the bill tracks how inefficiently you query. Two apps with identical users can differ by an order of magnitude on the second model and barely at all on the first.
- Free tiers are not comparable. Supabase pauses free projects after one week of inactivity. Firebase shuts a product off for the rest of the calendar month once you exceed its no cost quota. Those are different failure modes and the second one is worse in production.
- Check the billing period before you quote a price. Xano publishes 85 and 224 dollars prominently, but those are annual commitment prices. Month to month is 99 and 249. We had that wrong in two of our own older posts until this research corrected it.
- Firebase quietly removed file storage from its free plan. Since 3 February 2026 a project must be on the paid Blaze plan to use Cloud Storage for Firebase, and Spark projects on an appspot.com bucket now receive 402 and 403 errors.
- There is a real deprecation calendar running through 2027. Amplify Gen 1, Firebase Extensions, Firebase ML and Firebase Studio all have published end dates. Choosing a platform in 2026 means checking what is being switched off in 2027.
- The exit cost is the number nobody publishes. A Postgres based platform lets you take a standard dump. A proprietary document store does not, and that difference is worth more than any monthly saving.
What Each Provider Actually Costs
Prices are the vendor list price as published on 1 September 2026, in US dollars, for the first paid tier. Free tier limits are the headline constraints rather than the full list.
| Provider | Free tier | First paid tier | Billing unit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Supabase | 500 MB database, 5 GB egress, 1 GB file storage, 50,000 MAU, 2 projects | Pro, 25 per month | Resources, with per unit overages |
| Firebase and Firestore | 1 GiB stored, 50,000 reads per day, 20,000 writes per day, 10 GiB egress per month | Blaze, pay as you go, no monthly floor | Document reads, writes and deletes |
| Xano | Free plan | Essential, 99 per month monthly or 85 annual | Plan tier plus records |
| Convex | Free plan | Professional, per seat | Function calls and storage |
| Appwrite | Free plan | Pro | Plan tier, serverless or dedicated database |
| Nhost | Free plan | Pro | Plan tier plus compute |
| AWS Amplify | 12 month free tier per the Amplify pricing table | Pay as you go | AWS resource usage |
| PocketBase | Open source, self hosted | Your server bill | Nothing, you run it |
| Backendless | Free plan | From 15 per month | Plan tier plus API calls |
| Cloudflare Workers and D1 | 100,000 requests per day, D1 5 million rows read per day | 5 per month | Requests and rows |
Supabase, priced
The Free plan gives 500 MB of database, 5 GB egress, 1 GB file storage and 50,000 monthly active users across up to two projects, and it pauses a project after one week of inactivity. Pro is 25 dollars per month for 8 GB of disk per project, 250 GB egress, 100 GB file storage and 100,000 monthly active users. Overages are published per unit, at 0.125 dollars per GB of database, 0.09 dollars per GB of egress, 0.0213 dollars per GB of storage and 0.00325 dollars per monthly active user. Team is 599 dollars per month.
Compute is a separate add on running from Micro at 10 dollars, a two core instance with 1 GB of RAM, up to 16XL at 3,730 dollars, a 64 core instance with 256 GB. Pro and Team include 10 dollars of compute credit, which covers exactly one Micro. That detail catches teams out, because the 25 dollar figure is the platform fee and not the database.
Two dates to know. Supabase ended Postgres 14 support on 1 July 2026. And a breaking change announced 28 April 2026 stops tables in the public schema being exposed automatically through the Data API, which became the default for new projects on 30 May 2026 and will be enforced across all existing projects on 30 October 2026. If you have an older project, that is a deadline rather than a suggestion. Our Supabase production readiness guide covers the scaling limits in depth.
Firebase, priced
Firebase has two plans, the no cost Spark plan and the pay as you go Blaze plan, and Blaze includes the Spark no cost quotas with documented exceptions for Cloud Functions, Phone Auth and Test Lab.
On Spark, Firestore gives 1 GiB stored, 50,000 document reads, 20,000 writes and 20,000 deletes per day plus 10 GiB of egress per month. Realtime Database is capped at 100 simultaneous connections. Authentication includes 50,000 monthly active users. Cloud Functions are not available on Spark at all, which is worth stating plainly because a great deal of writing on the internet says otherwise. The 2 million free invocations belong to Blaze.
The Spark failure mode is specific and harsh. Google documents it as follows, that if you exceed the no cost quota for any product in a calendar month, that product is shut off for the rest of the month across every app in the project, and your options are to wait for the next billing cycle or upgrade.
Beyond the free quota, Firestore Standard edition in Iowa charges 0.03 dollars per 100,000 document reads, 0.09 per 100,000 writes, 0.01 per 100,000 deletes and 0.15 dollars per GiB per month of storage. Multi region nam5 is double the Iowa rate for reads, writes and deletes, and 0.18 dollars per GiB for storage. Egress is free for the first 10 GiB per month then 0.12 dollars per GiB for most destinations.
Since 3 February 2026 you need Blaze to use Cloud Storage for Firebase at all. That is the single biggest change to the Firebase free tier in years and it is easy to miss.
Xano, priced
Xano publishes Essential and Pro at 85 and 224 dollars, and those are annual commitment prices. Billed month to month they are 99 and 249. Its support documentation states a 99.99 percent uptime figure and a 99.95 percent figure in different places, so confirm which applies to your plan in writing. We are an Enterprise tier Xano partner, so treat our view here as informed and interested rather than neutral, and check the numbers yourself.
The rest, briefly
Convex bills function calls and storage with a per seat professional tier, and reported nearly 10,000 paying teams in an April 2026 post. Appwrite has repriced around serverless versus dedicated databases and now offers PostgreSQL and MySQL engines, which changes the Appwrite versus Supabase conversation materially. Nhost is managed Postgres with GraphQL. AWS Amplify publishes a 12 month free tier and is the natural pick if you are already committed to AWS, with the important caveat below. PocketBase is a single self hosted binary, so the cost is your server and your time. Backendless starts from 15 dollars per month and offers a free single server on premises licence with the condition that everything runs on one machine. Cloudflare Workers with D1 is not a full BaaS but is close enough to consider at 5 per month, with 10 million requests included.
The Billing Unit Trap
This is the part that decides your actual bill, and it is not on any comparison chart.
Supabase bills you for resources. More data and more traffic cost more, roughly linearly, and you can forecast it from your own growth numbers.
Firestore bills you per document read, and the reads are not always the ones you expect. Google documents all of the following. Every query costs a minimum of one read even if it returns nothing. A query with an offset of 10 that returns a single document charges 11 reads, because you pay for the skipped documents, which is why cursors are the documented alternative. A real time listener with offline persistence enabled that disconnects for more than 30 minutes is billed as a brand new query when it reconnects, including index entries. Aggregation is metered in index entries at 1,000 per read unit, so a count that scans 1,500 index entries bills as two document reads.
None of that is hidden, but it means a Firestore bill is a function of query design rather than user count. Google itself names the two classic causes of a runaway bill, which are forgetting to add a limit to a query with millions of results, and combinations of Cloud Functions that cause excessive fan out or infinite loops.
The guardrail question people ask next has an uncomfortable answer. Cloud Billing budgets and alerts do not cap usage, and Google states they can lag by up to a few days. Spend caps exist for exactly four services, Firebase AI Logic, App Hosting, Cloud Functions and Extensions, they are explicitly not hard caps, and Firestore is not one of the four. So there is no switch that stops a Firestore bill.
What It Costs to Leave
Every provider will tell you about onboarding. None of them publish the exit cost, so here it is in the only terms that matter, which is what shape your data comes out in.
Postgres based platforms are the cheap exit. Supabase, Nhost and Xano all sit on Postgres, and Supabase is Apache-2.0 licensed with documented self hosting. A standard Postgres dump restores anywhere. You still have to rewrite whatever auth, storage and realtime glue you used, but the data itself is portable and that is the expensive half.
Firestore is the expensive exit. The managed export writes LevelDB files with protobuf metadata, which is built to be imported back into Firestore rather than read as a portable dump. Google also documents that an export is not a guaranteed point in time snapshot, and that you are charged one document read for every document exported, so a full export of a large database has a real cost attached before you have converted anything.
Firestore now has two editions with incompatible billing units, which is a lock in shape worth naming. Standard bills per document read at 0.03 dollars per 100,000. Enterprise bills per 4 KiB read unit at 0.05 dollars per million, with write units at 0.26 per million and storage at 0.24 dollars per GiB per month. A cost model built for one edition does not transfer to the other, and a database created without choosing is classified as Standard.
Self hosted is the free exit and the expensive everything else. PocketBase and self hosted Supabase or Appwrite have no exit cost by definition. You pay in operational work instead, which is the trade every team underestimates once.
The 2027 Deprecation Calendar
Choosing a platform in 2026 means knowing what gets switched off in 2027. All of these are vendor published.
- AWS Amplify Gen 1 reaches end of life on 1 May 2027.
- Firebase Extensions were deprecated on 20 July 2026 and sunset on 31 March 2027. Already deployed extensions keep running indefinitely, but after that date you lose the ability to update, reconfigure or uninstall them through the console or CLI.
- Firebase ML was deprecated on 11 June 2026 and shuts down on 15 June 2027, and projects that were not already using it can no longer start.
- Firebase Studio sunsets on 22 March 2027, with new workspace creation and signup already disabled since 22 June 2026. Google is explicit that the core Firebase products are not affected.
- Firebase Dynamic Links already shut down on 25 August 2025.
- Supabase Data API default deny is enforced across all projects on 30 October 2026.
Two renames to keep out of your documentation. Firebase Data Connect became Firebase SQL Connect on 22 April 2026. And Vertex AI is now the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, which is a Google Cloud product and has nothing to do with a Firebase or BaaS licence.
How We Choose With Clients
We build on this category rather than writing about it from outside, so the shorthand we actually use is this.
Start with the billing unit and match it to your traffic shape. If your app is read heavy with predictable growth, a resource billed Postgres platform is easier to forecast and easier to leave. If your app is write heavy and bursty, and you have the engineering discipline to control query patterns, Firestore scales further than most people expect, because it publishes no maximum writes per second and states that write traffic scales without limits, subject to the documented ramp rule.
Then ask the exit question before you commit, not after. In our experience the platform decision that hurts is never the monthly price, it is discovering two years in that the data cannot come out in a shape anything else can read.
If you want the platform specific decision instead of the pricing view, see Xano versus Supabase versus a custom backend, and our guide on choosing a no code development agency if you want someone else to run it. We build on these platforms as custom software development and, for Xano specifically, as Xano development work.
Where These Numbers Come From
Every price, quota and date in this post was read from the vendor own pricing page, docs page, changelog or release notes on 1 September 2026, then checked a second time against the same source before publishing. Two verification notes worth passing on, because they cause errors elsewhere. Xano monthly prices are not present in the page source and only appear when the monthly toggle is clicked in a browser, which is how the annual price gets quoted as monthly, including by us until this research. And the Firestore pricing table defaults to hourly units, so the widely quoted per GB per month storage figure only appears when you switch it.
We have deliberately not published a dollar figure for any runaway bill incident. Google documents the causes and the unit prices but publishes no incident amounts, and the third party figures that circulate are not traceable to a primary source.
Prices change. Treat this as a dated snapshot, and check the vendor page before you build a business case on it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which backend as a service provider is cheapest?
At low traffic, Firebase on the Spark plan is cheapest because there is no monthly floor, though since February 2026 you need the paid Blaze plan to use file storage at all. At steady production traffic, a resource billed platform like Supabase Pro at 25 dollars per month is usually cheaper and always easier to forecast. Self hosted PocketBase is cheapest in licence terms and most expensive in engineering time.
What is the difference between Firestore Standard and Enterprise editions?
They bill on different units, so the cost models are not comparable. Standard charges per document read, at 0.03 dollars per 100,000 reads. Enterprise charges per 4 KiB read unit, at 0.05 dollars per million, with separate write and real time update units. Enterprise also adds MongoDB compatibility and makes indexes optional. A database created without selecting an edition is classified as Standard.
Can I run Cloud Functions on the free Firebase plan?
No. Cloud Functions are not available on the Spark plan, and the 2 million free invocations per month belong to the paid Blaze plan. This is one of the most commonly repeated errors in Firebase comparisons.
How do I stop a Firestore bill running away?
You cannot cap it directly. Cloud Billing budgets and alerts do not stop usage and can lag by a few days, and the spend cap feature covers only four services, none of which is Firestore. The practical controls are query design, always setting a limit, using cursors rather than offsets, and watching Cloud Functions for fan out patterns.
Is it hard to migrate off a backend as a service platform?
It depends entirely on whether your data sits in Postgres. Supabase, Nhost and Xano are Postgres based, so a standard dump restores anywhere and only the auth, storage and realtime glue needs rewriting. Firestore exports in a LevelDB and protobuf format designed for reimport into Firestore, and you are billed a document read for every document exported, so it is both a conversion project and a cost.
Which backend as a service platform scales furthest?
Firestore, on writes, because it publishes no maximum writes per second per database and states that write traffic scales without limits, provided you follow the documented ramp rule and avoid hotspots. Postgres based platforms have a clearer vertical ceiling, in Supabase case a 64 core instance, with read replicas that scale reads rather than writes.
Do I need a paid plan for a production app?
Yes, on every platform here, and usually earlier than expected. The free tiers are for evaluation. Supabase pauses inactive free projects after a week, and Firebase shuts an over quota product off for the remainder of the calendar month across the whole project, which is not a failure mode any production app can accept.
