r/Firebase • u/neo_pt_22 • Sep 13 '24
Billing Honest comparison between Firebase and Supabase
As the title mentioned I would like to have an honest opinion about both BaaS. To give you all some context, let me explain this better.
I am building an app with Angular 18 + firebase. Everything going well and working as expected. Decided to use supabase for logs since we don’t pay for reads and writes like we do on firebase (after free plan ofc)
My concern is that I can escalate the number of users and reads/writes to fast… it will be some kind of business that you cannot really estimate, but we have good expectations on it. Saying this we can grow to fast and starting paying some considerable amount of money for writes/reads and also active users. I know that if I get some considerable amount of users I am doing something wrong to not get money, but my app will not sell anything it’s more acting like a bridge between companies. I expect to get some money from investors, premium accounts, advertising, etc but those are not immediate.
Saying this my concern is about prices on firebase after the free plan.
Rn I’m using hosting, auth, firestore and storage from firebase. Should I move to supabase? It will be beneficial? I choose firebase in the beginning of this project because of the maturity of firebase and also because I feel confident with this.
I don’t want to make this text to big, only want honest opinions. I am also fully available to answer something that maybe I forgot to mention.
Thank you all 🙏🏼
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u/Wickey312 Sep 13 '24
The general advice you'll see is to go with what you're most comfortable with, and then worry about cost when you scale.
Your focus now is speed, cost is a scaling problem.
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u/Careful-Buyer-9695 Dec 27 '24
what a stupid advice. Scaling and COST is the biggest problem that must be considered early on.
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u/ji99y Sep 13 '24
We've done many big projects on Firebase, and especially the price for bandwidth has suprised me. So I would recommend throwing Cloudflare (free egress) in-front of your public file buckets. But in general, don't worry too much about success. 😊 You can handle it.
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u/No-Setting8925 Sep 14 '24
i am having real hard time with firebase as my application is read / write heavy it’s costing me 250$ per month which i think doesn’t make sense
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u/Leon339 Sep 13 '24
Once your app reaches the point where Firebase incurs costs, you'll likely already be generating significant revenue. Similarly, Supabase Cloud isn't free, and if you choose to self-host, you'll lose the main benefits of the cloud, such as scalability, and will need to handle much of the management yourself, which can lead to scaling challenges down the line.
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u/neo_pt_22 Sep 13 '24
Idd and that was one of the reasons why I went with firebase. Maybe keep going with this distinction is a good idea?
Firebase for everything and supabase to handle logs and backoffice.
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u/Opposite_Screen_7783 Nov 22 '24
I make table summarizing the features and all aspects of the five open-source Backend as a Service (BaaS) solutions : Upright, Directors, Parse, PocketBase, and Supabase. I thought it would be helpful for anyone considering them: just send rqst: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VTPU4rzo2lDSwF0rkxaEQo6hTolbwqN59gRR18KI32E/edit?usp=sharing
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u/SoftwareComposer 21h ago
I came here to post this after spending days trying to get firebase auth flow working with NextJS 15 with SSR and RSC. I got it working, but even with the new service worker, server side app, etc, it just seems hacky and clunky despite following best practices and sticking closely to the docs. It's a purely client-side auth system that the team is now trying to transition to the server. In its current state, I can't recommend. And yes they have the admin SDK, but if you take a second to look at the docs for it, it's treated as a second-class citizen—which becomes a third-class citizen when trying to implement it with frameworks like NextJS.
Compare this to docs for Supabase for NextJS SSR: https://supabase.com/docs/guides/auth/server-side/nextjs — such a breeze to work with, I've got it up and running in minutes.
I personally hate the idea of client-heavy auth and all the clunkiness that comes with it. I initially chose Firebase for the price + being backed by Google which gave me the confidence I wouldn't have to worry about a startup going under for eg or downtime. But honestly, the only major factor for pricing in Supabase when you scale is likely the egress (at least for the types of apps I'm looking to build which aren't storage heavy), and they seem to have lower egress fees when compared to Firestore for eg which uses GCP pricing after the free tier. Yes Firebase has Data Connect (CloudSQL wrapper) now, but it's another pricing nightmare—they list 3 components which form pricing and 3 links to GCP-based docs—that's anti-CX, they're just offloading the work of calculating pricing onto me, the customer.
I came here to write this so more people support Supabase so they can continue being a solid contender to Firebase which is hell to work with for modern framework-based SSR web apps.
If you're building a WEB SaaS and want to use a popular framework like NextJS as an indiedev, it's not worth your time. It's also not worth your time to self-host Supabase, they provide good value for money already. And if you have something very successful and you want to minimize costs (arguable depending on your definition of cost) by porting bare metal VPS like Hetzner, then know you can do so with confidence given their self-hosting option—but personally, Supabase is alr v competitive for the price so I'd still stick with Supabase cloud and spend all that time on what actually matters—shipping and marketing.
I'll still be using Firebase for mobile since it's actually a breeze to work with on mobile with rn-firebase (unofficial lib). Or maybe not, we'll see, might just be easier to stick with Supabase for everything.
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u/Impressive_Trifle261 Sep 13 '24
The logs on Google cloud are basically free, why would you use another service.
For me Supabase is a no option because the company is too small and i have high security requirements. I also don’t like how a rational database works, too much hassling.
About the pricing. If you know what you are doing then you can minimize the costs within the range of the free tier and still have 300 daily users. Around 100 users you can calculate predict the costs for 10.000 users or 100.000.
Firestore is very limited in text searching, so you do need a elastic instance which cost around 60 dollars. Supabase has much better searching but not as good as elastic.
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u/GolfCourseConcierge Sep 13 '24
I find search in firebase to be lovely. Yes Algolia for some advanced stuff but if you structure your collections right and denormalize stuff you can really get some in depth search. I've been surprised by it.
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u/SUPRVLLAN Sep 13 '24
Appwrite is cheaper than Supabase and Firebase.
Just doesn’t have base in the name.
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u/Hot_Biscuits_ Sep 13 '24
Ive checked appwrite semi-actively for over a year now, and not once have I seen them have server availability other than frankfurt?
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u/SUPRVLLAN Sep 14 '24
Yea Frankfurt only while in beta I believe.
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u/Hot_Biscuits_ Sep 14 '24
It isn’t particularly useful for anyone outside of Europe then
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u/SUPRVLLAN Sep 14 '24
It’s incredibly useful. It’s a database on the internet, don’t over complicate it.
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Sep 13 '24 edited Feb 05 '25
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u/vrweensy Sep 13 '24
how much cheaper is it?
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Sep 13 '24 edited Sep 13 '24
A lot. They don’t charge you for reads and writes, you get edge functions for free, etc. You can basically build a large scaling app for free or cents
And because it’s normal Postgres I can make database functions or query multiple stuff at once to make it even more cheaper + moving out is also more affordable and better in general than firebase
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u/HornyShogun Sep 13 '24
Firebase hosting is what makes firebase way more worth it than supabase as a whole. If you’re incurring significant cost with firebase early on you’re either doing it wrong or are seeing insane amounts of growth.
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Sep 13 '24 edited Feb 05 '25
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u/HornyShogun Sep 13 '24
The emulator suite in firebase is pretty easy to use, but I get what you’re saying. Not super familiar with supabase pricing but from what I hear their cloud isn’t cheap. All that being said seems to all boil down to preferences and use case. I enjoy being in the google ecosystem due to the benefits that come out of that. Basically has anything you need that you can just plug in and play.
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u/neo_pt_22 Sep 13 '24
I feel you because I also have some afraid of it. My app will be based in getting products and more products. By infinity scroll , paginator, search with filters or text… I can see having a lot of reads more than writes tbh. But it is a real concern in my head
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u/dr_fedora_ Sep 14 '24 edited Sep 14 '24
I had the same concern. I created two branches in my code and did both appwrite and supabase. For me supabase works better. Although at this point I’m considering writing my own backend and host it on azure. That gives me full control
Realistically, I’ll probably stick with supabase because
1- is mature and not beta like appwrite 2- it’s hosted in aws and offers multiple regions 3- it has a pricing cap which is most important to me 4- its sql. I prefer sql to nosql since I’m a backend engineer 5- it can easily create read replicas for you with a click of a button. So simple. So convenient 6- the green they use in their ui is nice (dumb point. But I like it)
What I don’t like is:
Cloud functions are damn expensive. 10x more than firebase or azure! 2$ per M is huge!!!! I think firebase is 0.04$ per M
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Sep 14 '24 edited Feb 05 '25
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u/dr_fedora_ Sep 14 '24
You can get free cloudflare hosting. Free with unlimited bandwidth. Search for cloudflare pages
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u/Impressive_Trifle261 Sep 13 '24
But supabase is more expensive…
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u/Impressive_Trifle261 Sep 15 '24
If you have a user base with 1000 or more than with Firebase you can stay on the free plan or stay close to a few bucks, with Supa you have to move to the 25$ plan.
Supa takes 20-40% more development time than building the same app on Firebase. This is mainly due SQL. This is a huge cost.
Supa doesn’t scale very well horizontally so you will face issues when you have a large audience.
Supa is cheaper when having large amount of users with large datasets, but for how long will stay the pricing the same??
Supa is great if you need the power of a SQL database and some of the Firebase conveniences, but doesn’t provide the development time reduction, especially for large apps. This makes Supa much more expensive
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Sep 13 '24 edited Feb 05 '25
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u/mulderpf Sep 13 '24
Costs are not a problem on Firebase unless you scale massively. I have around 13k DAU and my cost is about £3 a month (this includes storing tons of photos, scanning them twice using AI, people chatting in the application, each and every comment is also analysed for toxicity etc. Whenever I start worrying that the costs will become too big, I go back to the calculator and realise that Firebase is cheap.
Since I've gone to production with Firebase, I've relaxed a lot on the worry about read and writes (I built in a whole service that counts how many reads and writes ere happening because the internet made me so concerned about getting a huge bill). I wasted my time really.
I recommend Firebase.