Supabase Free Pauses Your Database When Nobody Visits
The quotas are generous for a free database. The thing that breaks demos is auto-pause: a week without traffic and your project sleeps until you wake it.
Supabase's free plan allows two active projects, a 500MB database, 1GB of file storage, 5GB of egress and up to 50,000 monthly active users. Projects pause automatically after one week without activity and must be restored manually. Pro is $25 a month and removes the pause and the two-project cap.1
The quotas are not the problem. Half a gigabyte of Postgres and fifty thousand monthly users is more than most side projects will ever need, and nothing on that list will stop a real application.
Auto-pause is the limit that matters, because it is the only one that takes something away. A free project nobody has touched for seven days goes to sleep, and the next visitor gets an error until somebody wakes it from the dashboard.
What the free plan actually includes
| Free | Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $0 | $25/mo |
| Active projects | 2 | Unlimited |
| Database size | 500MB | 8GB included, then metered |
| File storage | 1GB | 100GB |
| Egress | 5GB | 250GB |
| Monthly active users | 50,000 | 100,000 |
| Auto-pause | After 7 days inactive | Never |
| Backups | None | Daily, 7-day retention |
| Point-in-time recovery | No | Add-on |
| Paused project retention | 90 days, then deleted | Not applicable |
No backups on free is the second thing worth knowing. A free project that gets corrupted has no restore point, and the only copy is whatever you exported yourself.
Auto-pause, and the ninety-day deletion
Seven days without a request and the project pauses. Waking it is a button in the dashboard and takes a minute or two, so a paused project is recoverable rather than lost.
The part people miss is what happens next. A paused project is retained for 90 days and then deleted. Anyone who built something as a demo, left it alone for a quarter and came back to find it gone has met this policy.
That makes free Supabase a poor fit for anything seasonal, portfolio-ish or demonstration-only, which is exactly the sort of project people put on a free tier. A cron job that touches the database once a day prevents the pause entirely, and that is a five-minute fix that saves the whole problem.
Where the quotas actually bite
500MB of database is generous for text and tight for anything storing images in Postgres, which you should not be doing anyway. Storage at 1GB fills quickly once users upload files, and file uploads are the most common reason a small project outgrows the free tier.
Egress at 5GB is the other one. Serving a modest site through Supabase Storage with real traffic will approach it, and the overage behaviour is a hard limit rather than a bill.
Monthly active users at 50,000 is not a real constraint for anyone reading this. If you reach it, you are running a business and $25 is not the question.
Two projects is the constraint developers feel
Two active projects means one production app and one experiment. A staging environment alongside production uses the second, and then there is nothing left for the thing you wanted to try.
Deleting and recreating a project is the workaround, which is fine once and miserable as a habit. This is the limit that most often forces the upgrade before any quota does.
When the free plan is enough
A single side project with real but modest traffic, a prototype being validated, a personal tool with a cron job keeping it awake. The Postgres instance, auth, storage and row-level security are all genuinely the paid product rather than a limited version.
It is also the fastest way to get a real database behind a small app. Compare Vercel Hobby, which pairs naturally with it as long as the project stays non-commercial.
When it stops being enough
The first time a client needs backups, which free simply does not have. Or the first time the project pauses during a demo, which is the sort of thing that happens once.
At $25, Pro is the most expensive entry point in this category. It buys the removal of pause, daily backups, and enough storage that uploads stop being a consideration, and for anything with users that is the point where a database stops being a toy. Worth reading alongside Snyk, the other developer tool here whose free tier is a real product with one sharp edge.
Frequently asked questions
Is Supabase free?
Yes. The free plan costs nothing and includes two active projects, 500MB of database, 1GB of storage and 5GB of egress.
Why did my Supabase project pause?
Free projects pause after seven days without activity. You can restore one from the dashboard, and paused projects are retained for 90 days.
Does Supabase free have backups?
No. Daily backups are a Pro feature. On the free plan you are responsible for your own exports.
How many projects can I have for free?
Two active projects. Additional projects require Pro.
What happens to a project paused for more than 90 days?
It is deleted. Anything you have not exported is gone.
Plan quotas, pause behaviour, retention policy and pricing verified against Supabase's pricing page and documentation on 20 October 2026. The 90-day deletion of paused projects is a documented policy, not an edge case.
Sources
- Supabase pricing: supabase.com/pricing. Used for: Project limits, pause behaviour and Pro pricing.
All sources are the vendor's own plan or documentation pages, checked on 20 October 2026. Plan terms change without notice, so confirm current limits before you rely on them.
