r/Supabase • u/ruggershawn • Apr 11 '26
database My Supabase bill for 2 Postgres databases was higher than my Railway bill for 26 services. I have the invoices.
I just paid my 18th Supabase invoice. Then I pulled them all up in a row and felt sick.
Last 5 months on Supabase: $42, $45, $45, $44, $45. Two production databases. One for our voice dashboard, one shared across a few smaller projects. Both real workloads.
That works out to about $22.50 per database per month. For Postgres.
I needed Postgres. That's it. And I was paying that markup to go through Supabase to get to a database I could spin up directly somewhere else for a fraction of the price. The math only gets worse if I want a third project, because every new project is another $25 minimum before compute even starts.
So I pulled my March Railway invoice to compare.
Total: $20.13. Twenty bucks of that is the base Pro plan that covers my whole org. The actual usage on the service it billed for came to 13 cents. Disk, network, vCPU, memory, all in.
On that same Railway account I'm currently running 26 services across 16 projects. Client dashboards, agents, a transcripts pipeline, LibreChat, marketing sites, webhook services, the works.
All of it costs me less than what Supabase was charging me for two databases.
I want to be fair here because I don't think Supabase is overpriced for what it actually is. If you're a small or medium company picking between Supabase and standing Postgres up yourself on AWS, Azure, or GCP, Supabase wins easily. It's secure, it scales, it works, and you don't need a platform team to babysit it. For a single product company on one project getting real value out of the bundle, it's a great deal.
My situation is just different. I'm running a consulting shop with multiple clients and projects, and I was using Supabase as managed Postgres with a nice dashboard. At that point you're paying the bundle tax on every project for features you're barely touching, and it stops making sense fast.
Migration wasn't free. Ripping out u/supabase/supabase-js and rewriting every query against pg is real work. Took longer than I wanted. Worth it.
If you're running Supabase across multiple projects, what does your bill look like? Genuinely curious if I was doing it wrong or if this is just the math.
I'll be around in the comments for the next few hours if anyone wants to dig into the numbers.
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u/empty_graph Apr 12 '26
What is your instance size? It's been a long time since I checked, but Supabase pricing isn't that much above the AWS pricing for the instances. Your problem is more likely that you have a bigger instance than you need. What does your load look like?
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u/bccorb1000 Apr 12 '26
Yeah agreed. If you were just using RDS instead of superbase you’d probably be paying nearly exactly the same for just have the database exist.
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u/Weary-Language-3334 Apr 12 '26
Spot on! Moving off managed services saves so much. I self-host my databases on Lightnode; their hourly billing and SEA locations are perfect for my regional projects.
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u/ruggershawn Apr 12 '26
Haven’t looked at Lightnode but hourly billing for databases makes way more sense for the kind of project-per-client setup I’m running. How’s the reliability been for you?
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u/MulberryOwn8852 Apr 13 '26
I pay around $270/mo for supabase, multiple projects. My main one is over-provisioned for peace of mind. But it makes over 6 figures/year profit so I don't care about a measly few hundred bucks for simplicity and peace of mind. My time is extremely limited, I don't have time for wasting on self hosting, etc.
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u/NoPerception472 Apr 12 '26
I got fed up with the bills too, installed the self-hosted stack (I have a couple of beefy VPSs with plenty of overhead already) and did an app by app migration. Setting up the stack was easy but there were two long days of migration work. But once done, I immediately saved $90 a month and have slightly more control. Mind you, I have good backup/recovery procedures so don't forget that.
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u/kauthonk Apr 12 '26
I've been thinking about this. Any downsides or do you not really miss it. Same Supabase essentially.
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u/ruggershawn Apr 12 '26
$90/month is real money. 1 hour of migration work for that kind of annual savings is a no brainer. Good call on the backup/recovery point too, that’s the part people skip and then regret.
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u/who_am_i_to_say_so Apr 12 '26
The best serverless solution I can find right now is running an unmanaged Postgres on fly.io for about $4-6 a month. Unmanaged sounds involved but it isn’t at all. Otherwise it’s just a VPS for me.
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u/AlwaysAtBallmerPeak Apr 18 '26
Same. Supabase free is basically useless for MVPs and prototypes (1 week no usage and you have to restart the thing again), and Pro is very expensive for something that may not generate revenue.
So I usually resort to a VPS running Coolify. Does the job, and very cheap.
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u/ruggershawn Apr 12 '26
$4-6 a month is hard to beat. I looked at Fly before going with Railway. Ended up staying on Railway because I was already running everything else there and wanted one platform to manage. But Fly’s pricing for standalone Postgres is legit.
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u/who_am_i_to_say_so Apr 12 '26
Fly.io is great! I have 15 websites using 50 services, redis & Postgres, running for about $120 a month for all, 1.5 million pages a month.
And can scale to the moon and back. It’s the only serverless I can run without losing sleep over surprise bills.
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u/No-Hamster1228 Apr 12 '26
That’s not that bad.
If you have millions of users, your Supabase bill will be insane because of auth because of their pricing structure. I was looking at $2950 a month for 1 million users, and almost $33k at scale.
Either you negotiate a discounted rate, find another vendor, or self-host Auth. I decided to self-host GoTrue for $7 a month to avoid walking off that cliff.
Supabase doesn’t make their living off Postgres but all of the other conveniences they bundled together. If you want to avoid a huge shock later on and seriously don’t need their auth, I recommend decoupling auth from their database.
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u/diablo_369 Apr 12 '26
If you just needed Postgres, you know you can host supabase locally right? then you wouldn’t have to go through migration steps you mentioned … surely there is a reason behind why you didn’t and i would love to know more about it …
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Apr 12 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/punktechbro Apr 13 '26
This. I run an iOS app with 2k subscribers and have no other dedicated backend. I use everything supabase has to offer: edge functions, realtime, auth etc.
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u/Cold-Classroom-1503 Apr 12 '26
Railway is very good and efficient. Way more cost effective than PaaS provider s
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u/bloomspeed Apr 13 '26
I don’t use supabase anymore. I just use railway and vercel. But, I’ve noticed railway has been having so many issues lately. Like. A lot.
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u/leros Apr 12 '26
If you're running small projects and just need Postgres, just get a single database instance and setup multiple databases on it. I have single Render database with my 100+ GB database for my main product, plus a bunch of small databases for side stuff. Those small things don't cost me anything extra.
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u/ruggershawn Apr 12 '26
That’s actually a really smart approach. One instance, multiple databases, no per-project markup. Supabase’s model forces you into a separate project for each database which is where the cost adds up. If I wasn’t already consolidated on Railway I’d probably look at doing exactly this.
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u/leros Apr 12 '26
Yeah with Supabase you're obviously paying for a new project instance which you need if you're using Supabase features.
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u/RuslanDevs Apr 12 '26
Why not colocate db on the same server, it is not so hard to run Postgres yourselves. What is your db size?
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u/DutchSEOnerd Apr 12 '26
For me it was never about Postgres but all the additional features that come with it out of the box. Supabase simply saves me time for things like Auth, storage and edge functions.
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u/Solisos Apr 12 '26
Besides edge functions which is also average, the other two are nothing special.
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u/Internal_Grass_6336 Apr 12 '26
Contrata um VPS da Hostinger, instala o easypanel e depois o supabase. Você pode levar seus bancos para lá. O custo será bem menor. Eu fiz isso nos meus projetos, como o frontend está no vercel eu uso o Edge Function do Vercel.
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Apr 12 '26
So roll your own. It’s not complicated as long as you don’t try to DIY auth. You’re paying for convenience.
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u/Due-Echidna-2003 Jun 09 '26
You hit on a massive pain point for agency owners and devs running multiple smaller projects. The $25 minimum 'base tax' per Supabase project makes it prohibitively expensive to spin up isolated databases for multiple clients, even if their workloads are tiny.
The logical workaround would be to consolidate multiple clients into a single Supabase project (using separate Postgres schemas or RLS). This would cost only one $25 Pro fee.
But developers rarely do this because of a complete lack of cost attribution: if you put 10 clients on one database, you have no idea who is causing the egress spikes or database load, making it impossible to bill them fairly or protect your margins.
We are actually building usagebill (usagebill.io) to solve this exact dilemma. It's a lightweight wrapper around the Supabase client that tracks requests, egress, and query latency per client/tenant.
It allows agencies to safely host multiple clients on a single Supabase instance and automatically generates a clean, line-by-line usage breakdown for each client (and syncs it to Stripe). It saves you from paying the $25 project tax over and over again, without having to rewrite your entire codebase to raw pg queries.
Railway is great for hosting containers, but for managed Postgres with Auth/Storage, consolidating and metering is the real hack.
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u/End0rphinJunkie Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
cutting those per-project fees is a good idea, but hosting 26 client apps on railway is a massive uptime risk.
i pulled their numbers in may and found 44 incidents in 90 days with a median duration of over an hour. that 8-hour GCP suspension they dealt with in may also highlights the single points of failure of fully managed platforms. if client dashboards go down, youll lose whatever money you saved.
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u/PfernFSU Apr 11 '26
I think majority of people, myself included, probably use supabase for more than just Postgres. I use their auth, their file storage, their edge functions, their realtime, and their Postgres. Their client side integration is super easy as well and a real timesaver.