Is Firebase free? What it actually costs in 2026

What the free tier actually includes

• —Realtime Database: 1 GB stored, 360 MB a day downloaded (about 10 GB a month)
• —Cloud Firestore: 1 GiB stored, 50,000 reads, 20,000 writes and 20,000 deletes a day
• —Hosting: 10 GB stored, 360 MB a day transferred
• —No Cloud Storage, no Cloud Functions, no phone auth — those are Blaze-only
• —Authentication: 50,000 monthly active users

Where the wall is

Your first file upload or backend trigger. Cloud Storage and Cloud Functions do not exist on Spark, so the moment an app stores a user's photo or runs server-side code you are on Blaze with a billing account, and every quota becomes a meter — Functions at $0.40 per million invocations after the first 2 million a month, Realtime Database at $5 per GB stored and $1 per GB downloaded past the free allowance.

After that: Blaze is pay as you go: the Spark quotas stay free, then Realtime Database $5 per GB stored and $1 per GB downloaded, Hosting $0.026 per GB stored and $0.15 per GB transferred, Cloud Functions $0.40 per million invocations. Cloud Storage is free up to 5 GB-months stored and 100 GB a month downloaded on a *.firebasestorage.app bucket (in us-central1, us-west1 or us-east1), then Google Cloud Storage pricing; a legacy *.appspot.com bucket is $0.026 per GB past 5 GB. Up to $300 in credit for eligible new accounts.

Can you self-host Firebase? No — cloud only

Firebase is Google-hosted only. Supabase, Appwrite and PocketBase are the self-hostable backends compared here; all three run on one box.

Questions people ask

What does the Firebase Spark plan include?

Realtime Database 1 GB stored and 360 MB a day downloaded; Cloud Firestore 1 GiB stored with 50,000 reads, 20,000 writes and 20,000 deletes a day; Hosting 10 GB stored and 360 MB a day transferred; Authentication for 50,000 monthly active users. Firebase says the no-cost limits are enforced daily and refreshed at midnight, and they apply per project.

Is Firebase Storage free?

Not on Spark any more. Firebase's storage FAQ says a project on the Spark plan has no access to any Cloud Storage bucket, default buckets included, and that the requirement for existing *.appspot.com buckets took effect on 3 February 2026 — calls return 402 or 403 and the files stay where they are. On Blaze, a *.firebasestorage.app bucket is free up to 5 GB-months stored and 100 GB a month downloaded, in us-central1, us-west1 or us-east1.

What happens when you hit a Spark plan limit?

Nothing is billed: Spark has no payment method, and overage prices exist only on Blaze. Firebase's pricing page says the no-cost limits are enforced daily and refreshed at midnight; it does not spell out per product what stops working in between, so plan for the service refusing requests until the reset.

What it actually takes to run one yourself

Real RAM against the documented minimum, monthly cost, setup time, and the one thing that catches people out.

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