Supabase Alternatives in 2026
7 places to run Postgres and your API on one bill, for teams that mostly use Supabase as a database
If you mostly use Supabase as a Postgres database next to your app, the cheapest place to run that database and the API together is Light Cloud at $5 a month. Firebase with Cloud SQL starts at $9.37 plus usage, Prisma Postgres at $10 and Aiven at $12, against $25 for Supabase Pro. But if your app leans on Supabase's sign-in, realtime or file storage, Light Cloud is the wrong Supabase alternative: it has none of the three. Appwrite, Nhost and Firebase do, and they are in the table too.
We make Light Cloud, the first row below, so here is the method before the results. Every price links to the vendor's own page.
First, what do you use Supabase for?
Supabase is two products sold as one. One is a full Postgres database per project, with a direct connection string, the kind you'd open with psql or point an ORM at (connection docs). The other is a backend kit on top of it: auth, realtime, file storage, a REST API generated from your schema and Edge Functions (features).
Some teams use only the first half. Their API is a Node, Django or Rails app that runs somewhere else and talks to Supabase over a connection string. For them, the reasons to look around are concrete: Free projects pause after a week of low activity, there is a limit of 2 active free projects, Pro is $25 a month (pricing), and the app server is still a second bill somewhere else.
This ranking is for that team. If you use the whole kit, jump to the section after the ranking.
How we ranked
The reference setup is a Node.js API and a PostgreSQL database of about 1 GB, serving about 1,000 requests a day spread across the day. Each platform gets its cheapest plan where the database is never paused and the API runs on the same bill. Prices are list prices from the vendors' own pages, checked on 2026-10-13, in US dollars, no trial credits. Where a platform bills by usage I show the arithmetic.
"Spread across the day" matters for the serverless databases. A database that sleeps after 5 idle minutes never sleeps if a request arrives every minute and a half, so I price it as awake all month. If your traffic stops at night, those rows get cheaper, and I say by how much.
Kept running all month, with no scale to zero, the same setup gets the Always on prices in the table. Light Cloud comes fifth of seven there at about $56, because an always-on instance needs the $19 Starter plan and a Micro costs about $52 a month. Aiven Runtime never sleeps, Prisma documents a guard that keeps an app awake, Firebase can keep one function warm, and Nhost can run the API as a container. Neon Functions and Appwrite Functions shut down when idle, so they're listed last.
The ranking
1. Light Cloud
Best for: teams that use Supabase as plain Postgres and want the API on the same $5 bill.
The Lite plan is $5 a month and includes $5 of usage and one shared PostgreSQL database (pricing). My reference setup uses about $4.24 of it: $4 for the database, about $0.20 for the API (1,000 requests a day at 0.2 s each is 1.7 instance-hours at $0.12) and a few cents of build minutes. Nothing pauses the database on a paid plan. And the API can be Node, but it doesn't have to be: we deploy Django, Spring Boot, .NET and more from the same repository, and the database's connection string goes into the app as one environment variable, DATABASE_URL. Adding Postgres to a Node.js app takes about 15 minutes.
It's managed PostgreSQL with a data explorer for browsing tables, running SQL, importing and exporting, in the same console as the deploys. The API scales to zero, which is why it costs 20 cents, and the price is a cold start: 3.1 to 3.7 seconds when I measured it.
The gaps, plainly, because this is the post where they matter most. There is no auth, no realtime, no file storage and no generated REST API; you write those in your API or bring a library. The shared database tier runs in Belgium only. A branch preview uses the production database until you give it its own, so there is no database copy per pull request. And the Free plan has no databases at all; they start on Lite.
2. Firebase
Best for: mobile and web apps that want Google's auth and realtime sync, with Postgres on the side.
Firebase's main databases, Firestore and Realtime Database, are NoSQL (Firestore). Its Postgres option is SQL Connect, a GraphQL layer over a Cloud SQL instance, and Cloud SQL starts at $9.37 a month on the pay-as-you-go Blaze plan, with a 3-month no-cost trial for the first instance. Cloud Functions include 2 million invocations a month at no cost (pricing), so the reference API adds little or nothing.
Auth, realtime listeners and file storage are all built in, and auth is free for most sign-in methods. The trade-offs: Blaze needs a card, a direct SQL connection to the Cloud SQL instance needs IAM roles set up first, and spend caps only cover a few services such as Cloud Functions, not Cloud SQL. Hosting preview channels for pull requests talk to your real backend, not a copy.
3. Prisma Postgres
Best for: TypeScript teams that want the database, the app and a hard spend limit in one project.
Starter is $10 a month with 1 million database operations, 10 GB of storage and daily backups (pricing). Prisma Compute, generally available since 2026-08-28, hosts Node.js, Bun or Next.js apps next to the database and scales them to zero; at the same 0.2 s per request, the reference API's CPU time comes to about 11 cents. Every paid plan has a hard spend limit that is on by default, which no other row turns on for you.
Compute runs TypeScript only, with no WebSocket servers and no built-in cron. Each query counts as one billed operation, a SELECT 1 included. A branch preview gets its own new, empty database, but only for databases declared in Prisma Composer, which is early access. File storage arrived in July 2026; auth means a library such as Better Auth.
4. Aiven
Best for: fixed hourly prices on plain open source Postgres.
The Developer plan is $5 a month for 1 CPU, 1 GB of RAM and 8 GB of storage, and never powers off for inactivity (pricing). Aiven Runtime, generally available since 2026-09-23, runs your app container next to it from $7 a month (Runtime pricing): $12 in total. Aiven's bill only changes when you change something, which is the most predictable model here.
The Developer plan caps Postgres at 20 connections with no pooling and doesn't let you pick the region. Runtime doesn't redeploy on git push; you redeploy by hand, and Aiven says it is not meant as a general-purpose web host for high-scale public apps. Forking a database into a copy needs the Startup plan, from $75.
5. Neon
Best for: serverless Postgres with copy-on-write branches.
Launch has no base fee: compute is $0.106 per CU-hour and storage $0.35 per GB-month (pricing). The smallest compute is 0.25 CU, and it sleeps after 5 idle minutes. With requests all day it never sleeps: 720 hours at 0.25 CU is 180 CU-hours, $19.08, plus $0.35 of storage and a little for Neon Functions running the API. About $20. The Free plan gives each project 100 CU-hours, which Neon says is 400 hours of a 0.25 CU compute; an app that is quiet half the day can fit inside it and pay nothing.
Branching is the best in this table. A branch is an instant copy-on-write clone, the GitHub integration makes one per pull request, and since September 2026 a branch copies auth and object storage too. It now sells a backend around the database too: Better Auth, S3-compatible storage and Functions, with realtime still to come, by its own account. Functions are JavaScript and TypeScript only, and Neon says they are not full-stack app hosting. Spend control is email alerts, not a cap.
6. Appwrite
Best for: the closest open source match to Supabase's feature list.
Pro is $25 a month per project and includes $10 of database credit, which covers the smallest native PostgreSQL database, 1 core and 1 GB (Postgres docs). Native Postgres launched on 2026-09-01 and gives you a direct connection string, PostgreSQL 18 by default. The API runs as Appwrite Functions, with 3.5 million executions included on Pro.
Auth with 30-plus OAuth providers, realtime over WebSockets, storage buckets and generated REST and GraphQL APIs are all there, and the server is BSD-licensed if you'd rather self-host. Native Postgres needs a paid plan with a card, so the Free plan has no direct SQL. Functions stop at 15 minutes. Free projects pause after a week without console activity and are deleted after 90 days paused.
7. Nhost
Best for: Postgres with a generated GraphQL API, auth and storage.
Pro is $25 a month and includes $15 of compute credit, enough for one project's shared compute, plus a 10 GB database (pricing). Every project gets its own dedicated Postgres, and the API can run as Nhost Functions (JavaScript or TypeScript) or as your own container on Nhost Run. The Hasura engine generates a GraphQL API with realtime subscriptions from your schema.
What to weigh: custom domains are a $10 per project add-on, direct database access from outside goes through a pooler you switch on, and there are no previews per pull request; a separate environment is a separate project, about $15 a month more. Nhost is also replacing Hasura with its own engine, Constellation, which was alpha and opt-in when I checked.
If you use the whole Supabase kit
Then the ranking above is mostly the wrong list, and it'd be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Appwrite and Nhost are the closest like-for-like moves, and Firebase is the big-company one. Two more are worth a look even though they don't run Postgres. Convex has its own reactive database with realtime built in and preview deployments (in beta) on every plan, including Free (pricing). PocketBase is a single Go program with SQLite, auth, realtime and file storage that you run on your own server, though its docs say it is not recommended for production-critical apps before version 1.0. Or keep Supabase and self-host it with Docker, minus branching and managed backups.
Where the others beat us
Everything Supabase is famous for beyond the database, we don't have. No sign-in, no realtime, no storage buckets, no generated API. If you'd have to rebuild auth to move, don't move to us. For a database per pull request, Neon's copy-on-write branches and Xata's GitHub App, which gives every pull request its own Postgres branch, are far ahead of our shared previews. If you need the database outside Europe, Prisma Postgres runs in six regions and Neon in any of its regions, while our shared tier is in Belgium. And if a hard spend cap matters more than price, Prisma turns one on by default; ours is an option you set at checkout.
What we do well is narrower and, for a lot of teams, the whole job: a Postgres database that never pauses and the API that uses it, in whatever language it's written, on one $5 bill, with a preview environment for every branch of the API and nothing to configure between them. If that's how you already use Supabase, scale-to-zero hosting for the API and a $4 database will do the same job for a fifth of the price.
Which Supabase feature would you miss first if you moved?
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