Is Firebase free? What it actually costs in 2026
Yes, there is a free tier — with limits.
The Spark tier is free with hard quotas. Beyond it, Blaze is pay-as-you-go and metered on operations rather than seats: roughly $0.06 per 100,000 document reads, $0.18 per 100,000 writes and $0.02 per 100,000 deletes on Firestore, with Realtime Database around $5 per GB stored and $1 per GB downloaded. A modest app at 5,000 daily users lands near $12 a month. The number that surprises people is not the rate, it is the shape — a badly written listener that re-reads a collection on every render costs the same as a feature nobody asked for. Figures checked 2026-07-31.
When paying is still the right call
Stay if you are shipping fast and the bill is small — Blaze at $12 a month is not a problem worth a migration, and Firebase's client SDKs, offline sync and push notifications are still the smoothest in the category. Stay if your app is genuinely mobile-first: the offline-first behaviour in the Firebase SDKs is better than anything the alternatives offer, and rebuilding it yourself is a real project. Stay if you are already deep in Google Cloud, where IAM, BigQuery export and Analytics integration all just work. And stay if nobody on the team wants to own a Postgres instance.
What you are locked into
High, and it is the query layer rather than the data. Exporting documents from Firestore is straightforward; rewriting every query, security rule and Cloud Function that assumed a document store is not. Firebase Authentication is the sharper hook — user records and password hashes are exportable, but any app depending on Firebase's client SDKs for session handling needs its auth flow rebuilt, not repointed. Teams that keep business logic out of Cloud Functions and behind their own API keep the exit affordable.
If you would rather not pay: Supabase
Supabase
Postgres with Firebase's ergonomics — and you can take the database with you.
Free tier for small projects; hosted Pro from about $25/month. Fully self-hostable at no licence cost.
See all 5 Firebase alternatives comparedCompare the free options head-to-head
Pricing is verified against the vendor's published figures and dated above. Vendors change prices — confirm current numbers with Google before you commit. More backend as a service decisions on Macrostack.