Pricing: PocketBase Cloud vs Supabase

PocketBase Cloud and Supabase price very differently: Supabase charges per project (each project needs its own compute instance), while PocketBase Cloud charges per plan — and on Pro, per server, no matter how many instances run on it. This page compares real monthly costs across the dimensions that matter.

Prices below are as of July 2026 — check the Supabase pricing page and the PocketBase Cloud pricing section for current numbers.

Summary

Free tier

Supabase Free includes 2 projects with a 500 MB database, 1 GB file storage, and 50,000 monthly active users — genuinely generous. The catch: free projects pause after one week of inactivity and must be manually restored, so they’re not suitable for anything that needs to stay up.

PocketBase Cloud Free includes 1 PocketBase instance (50 MB storage) plus 5 frontend deployments. Instances stay running — no hibernation, no cold starts — though instances inactive for 30 days are removed. A $0 Stripe subscription is required (you’re never charged).

If you want a bigger free database for a project you rarely touch, Supabase wins. If you want a small app that’s actually always on, plus somewhere to host its frontend, PocketBase Cloud wins.

A single project

PocketBase Cloud Starter is $5/month: 1 PocketBase instance with 3 GB storage on a dedicated server cluster, your choice of 6 locations, a custom domain, and 5 frontend deployments included.

Supabase Pro is $25/month: it includes $10 in compute credits (covering one Micro instance for one project), an 8 GB database, 100 GB file storage, and 100,000 MAUs.

Supabase’s Pro tier includes bigger raw quotas — but at 5× the price, and you still need to host your frontend elsewhere. For a typical small production app, $5/month on PocketBase Cloud covers the database, auth, file storage, and the frontend.

Multiple projects — where the models diverge

This is the biggest pricing difference between the two platforms.

On Supabase, every project needs its own compute instance. The Pro plan’s $10 credit covers the first project; each additional project adds a Micro instance at ~$10/month (billed hourly):

On PocketBase Cloud, you have two cheap paths:

• Starter add-ons — +1 PocketBase instance for $5/month each. Three projects: $5 + 2 × $5 = $15/month.
• Pro dedicated compute — a flat $20/month for your own 2-core / 4 GB compute that hosts up to 20 PocketBase instances. Twenty projects: still $20/month, because you pay for the compute, not per project.

For agencies, indie hackers with a portfolio of apps, or anyone running per-client deployments, this difference dominates everything else on the page.

Frontend hosting

Supabase doesn’t host frontends — you’ll pair it with Vercel, Netlify, or Cloudflare Pages, which adds another bill (or another free tier with its own limits) and another dashboard.

PocketBase Cloud includes static site hosting on every plan: 5 frontends on Free and Starter (+5 for $5/month as an add-on), up to 50 on Pro. Frontend, database, and backend live in one project on one bill — see Deploying a Frontend.

Functions: hooks vs Edge Functions

Both platforms let you run custom server-side logic — routes, event handlers, scheduled jobs — but they bill it very differently.

Supabase Edge Functions are billed per invocation: 2 million included on Pro, then $2 per million. Costs scale with traffic.

PocketBase Cloud includes JavaScript hooks on every plan — Free included. Hooks cover the same ground as Edge Functions (custom API routes, record event handlers, cron jobs, outbound HTTP calls) and run inside your instance, right next to your data. There’s no invocation counter and no per-call billing — a hook that fires a million times costs the same as one that fires once.

Dedicated backends

For workloads that outgrow functions — long-running jobs, websockets, large dependencies, a full Next.js app — PocketBase Cloud Pro runs full backend containers (Node.js, Next.js, Deno, Bun) on your dedicated compute at a flat monthly price, with no per-request billing. See Deploying a Backend.

Supabase has no equivalent — anything beyond the edge-function model means renting a separate service (Fly.io, Railway, a VPS) with its own bill.

Storage and bandwidth

Supabase meters overages on Pro: database beyond 8 GB at $0.125/GB, file storage beyond 100 GB at $0.0213/GB, and — the one that surprises people — egress beyond 250 GB at $0.09/GB. A traffic spike or a popular file download shows up on your bill (spend caps can stop the overage — by cutting the service off instead).

PocketBase Cloud ties storage to your plan (50 MB Free, 3 GB Starter, your dedicated compute’s disk on Pro) and includes bandwidth with the compute — there is no per-GB egress meter. If you need more headroom for files, PocketBase also supports S3-compatible storage, so you can plug in any bucket at commodity prices.

The honest bottom line

• One project, generous quotas, don’t mind $25/mo — Supabase Pro is a fine deal, especially if you need Postgres itself (see PocketBase vs Supabase).
• One small production app on a budget — PocketBase Cloud Starter at $5/mo, frontend included.
• Several projects — PocketBase Cloud is dramatically cheaper: $20/mo flat for a dedicated compute that hosts up to 20 instances vs ~$115/mo for ten Supabase projects.
• Predictability — flat plan and flat compute price vs metered MAUs, egress, and invocations.

Next steps

• PocketBase vs Supabase — feature comparison
• Plans & Billing