Firebase pricing in 2026: what it really costs

TL;DR: Firebase costs $0 on the Spark plan and is pay-as-you-go on Blaze, where my three example apps cost $0.45, $113 and $1,047 a month. The bill tracks Firestore reads, file downloads and SMS, not the number of servers, so it grows with every user and every screen they open.

• Stay on Spark if your app fits 50,000 Firestore reads and 20,000 writes a day and stores no files. Since February 2026, Cloud Storage needs Blaze.
• Move to Blaze if you need file uploads, Cloud Functions or phone sign-in. A small app on Blaze still costs cents, because Spark's free quotas carry over.
• Watch SMS and Firestore reads. In my medium example, sign-in texts are $47 and reads are $22 of the $113, and a careless listener can multiply the reads.
• Pick Supabase if you want a fixed $25 a month with Postgres instead of per-read billing. Past 100,000 users, its per-user charge makes it dearer than Firebase's free base Auth.
• Move to your own server, with Ployz, which I build, if your Firebase bill is past about $20 a month and you can run Postgres and an auth library yourself. The medium and busy apps cost $11 and $19 there.

How much does Firebase cost per month?

Firebase has no monthly fee on either plan. Spark costs nothing, and when a product goes over its quota, that product stops for the rest of the month. Blaze also has no base fee, so you pay only for usage past the free quotas.

Many Firebase products are free on both plans and never show up on the bill. That list includes Analytics, Cloud Messaging, Crashlytics, A/B Testing, App Distribution, In-App Messaging and Performance Monitoring.

The Spark rule is strict. Firebase's docs say that if you go over a free quota, "your project's usage of that specific product will be shut off for the remainder of that month" (pricing plans). That's safe for a hobby project and bad for anything with paying users.

What would your app cost on Firebase?

Pick the app closest to yours. Prototype fits the free plan, and small, medium and busy are the worked bills below. To use your own numbers, read daily Firestore reads off the Usage and billing page in the Firebase console and set them under Customize.

Five numbers move the bill: users, Firestore reads, file downloads, Hosting transfer and sign-in texts. The calculator fills in the rest from them, and the "Assumed" line shows what it used. It prices Firestore in us-central1 and leaves out Cloud Functions compute, Cloud Storage operations and Firestore deletes, which are a few dollars for most apps.

What do three real apps cost on Firebase?

These are three of the calculator's presets, priced in us-central1 with base Firebase Auth. Every app uses Cloud Storage for uploads, so none of them fits on Spark.

A side project with real users: 5,000 users, 100,000 reads a day. It stores 5 GB of uploads and serves 10 GB of pages a month.

A growing app: 50,000 users, 2.5 million reads a day. It has 5 GB in Firestore, 25 GB of uploads and phone sign-in in the US.

A busy app: 500,000 users, 25 million reads a day. It has 50 GB in Firestore, sends 1 TB of file downloads and 50,000 sign-in SMS a month.

If the busy app turns on Identity Platform for multi-factor auth, its 500,000 users add $2,115 a month. That's twice the rest of the bill.

What does Firebase charge per read, write and GB?

Blaze charges per document for Firestore, per GB for files and transfer, and per text message for phone sign-in. These are the rates behind the calculator, after the free quotas.

Firestore's free quotas reset every day around midnight Pacific time, and only one database per project gets them. The multi-region locations nam5 and eur3 cost twice as much: $0.06 per 100,000 reads and $0.18 per 100,000 writes. The Cloud Storage free tier applies only to buckets in us-central1, us-west1 and us-east1. Cloud Functions also get 400,000 GB-seconds and 200,000 CPU-seconds free each month, then Cloud Run rates.

SMS prices vary by country. A US code costs $0.01, a UK code $0.04 and a German one $0.10.

Is Firebase Authentication free?

Base Firebase Authentication has no per-user charge for email, social and anonymous sign-in, on either plan. Phone sign-in is the exception: it needs Blaze and each SMS is billed.

The charge per user comes with an optional upgrade called Firebase Authentication with Identity Platform. You need it for multi-factor auth, blocking functions, SAML and OpenID Connect. Once upgraded, Spark projects are limited to 3,000 daily active users, and Blaze projects pay per monthly active user past 50,000 (Firebase Auth docs).

Each band is charged at its own rate. With Identity Platform, 100,000 users cost $275 a month and 1 million cost $4,415.

Why do Firestore bills jump?

Firestore charges per document read, and several ordinary patterns read more documents than you'd expect. These rules are from Firebase's own Firestore billing docs.

• Every query costs at least one read, "even if the query returns no results."
• Listeners bill every change. You're "charged for a read each time a document in the result set is added or updated", so a chat screen listening to 50 messages pays for each new one, on every open device.
• Reconnects can re-read everything. With offline persistence on, a listener that's been disconnected for more than 30 minutes is billed as a brand-new query. With it off, every reconnect is.
• Offsets aren't free. A query with an offset of 10 that returns one document costs 11 reads.

The medium app above reads 2.5 million documents a day for 50,000 users. That's 50 reads per user per day, which one feed screen with a listener can reach on its own. When a Firestore bill doubles, I'd look for a listener on a large collection before anything else.

Can you cap Firebase spending?

No, Blaze has no overall spending cap. Firebase's docs say "budget alerts do not cap your usage or charges" (pricing plans). They're emails, and you have to act on them yourself.

Spend caps exist for four products only: Firebase AI Logic, App Hosting, Cloud Functions and Extensions. A spend cap pauses new usage of that product when it reaches its budget. Firestore, Storage, Hosting and SMS have no cap, so a runaway listener or a scraped file keeps billing until you stop it.

Did Firebase pricing change in 2026?

Yes, twice, and both changes moved apps from free to paid.

The Storage change is the big one. Any app that stores a profile photo now needs a billing account, even if it never pays a cent. The files in an old Spark bucket stay where they are, but the app can't read them until the project moves to Blaze.

App Hosting, Firebase's newer host for Next.js and Angular apps, also started charging for bandwidth on August 1, 2025. It's Blaze only, with 10 GiB free a month, then $0.20 per GiB uncached and $0.15 cached. Firebase's own sample bill for a site with 1 million visits is $69.58 a month (App Hosting costs).

Is Firebase cheaper than Supabase?

It depends on your user count. Supabase Pro is a fixed $25 a month for a project with a Micro database, 100,000 monthly active users, 8 GB of disk and 250 GB of egress (Supabase pricing).

Supabase wins in the middle, because Postgres doesn't bill per read. Firebase wins at the ends: below Spark's quotas it costs cents, and past 100,000 users Supabase charges $0.00325 per extra user while base Firebase Auth charges nothing. The Supabase column leaves out SMS and frontend hosting, which you'd pay for elsewhere. I compare its tiers in detail in Supabase pricing and its limits in Is Supabase free?.

Is Firebase cheaper than running your own server?

For a small app, no. Firebase costs $0.45 for the side project, and the smallest server costs about $7. From the medium app up, a server wins clearly: about $11 against $113, and about $19 against $1,047.

Hetzner's CX servers are in Germany and Finland only. For users in the US, Netcup's Manassas datacenter costs about €1 more a month than its European price. I list more cheap servers in the cheapest VPS.

The server prices are for Europe, exclude VAT and include the IPv4 address. The server column also leaves out SMS: if you keep phone sign-in, you pay an SMS provider either way. Ployz adds nothing to the server price, because it's free on your own servers.

The comparison isn't like for like, and the gap is the work. Firebase gives you a realtime database, auth, file storage and security rules with no backend code. On your own server you write that backend: Postgres for data, an auth library in your app, files on a volume. For an app that's still finding users, that work costs more than the bill it saves.

Where Ployz fits

I've paid usage-based bills that climbed every month. On Railway I was paying over $500, and most of it was one busy database. Today one dedicated server at €80 a month runs everything I have, and I build Ployz for that move.

Ployz deploys apps from GitHub to servers you rent. It's free on your own servers, custom domains included.

ployz up --server root@your-server

That installs Ployz on the server over SSH, uploads the current directory, builds it and gives it an https address. For push-to-deploy, connect the repo as in deploying from GitHub.

• Push to GitHub and Ployz builds and deploys your backend, no Dockerfile needed for common languages.
• One-click PostgreSQL 18, MySQL, Redis or MongoDB next to your app, with a sealed generated password.
• A mirror of your database on another of your servers, synced when you ask. Restore from it if a server dies, or move the database there with seconds of downtime.
• A preview environment per pull request at its own https address.
• Zero-downtime deploys when a health check is set.

Ployz doesn't offer auth, realtime sync or file storage as a service. Use an auth library in your app and store files on a volume.

Ployz isn't a Firebase replacement. It runs the backend you'd write instead of Firebase, on a server whose price doesn't change with reads. If your Firebase bill is under about $20 a month, I'd stay on Firebase.

FAQ

Is Firebase free?

Yes, the Spark plan is free with no card, and many products are free on every plan. Spark covers 50,000 Firestore reads and 20,000 writes a day, 1 GiB of Firestore data and 360 MB a day of Hosting transfer. It doesn't include Cloud Storage, Cloud Functions or phone sign-in, so most apps that take uploads need Blaze.

Is the Blaze plan free to start?

Yes, Blaze has no monthly fee and includes all of Spark's free quotas. A small app on Blaze often pays under $1 a month. Blaze does need a billing account, and it has no overall spending cap.

Can Firebase handle 10 million users?

Yes, Firebase is built for that scale, and base Firebase Auth has no per-user charge. With Identity Platform, 10 million monthly active users cost $33,215 a month in Auth alone. The Realtime Database allows 200,000 simultaneous connections per database, so very large apps split across several databases.

Is the Realtime Database cheaper than Firestore?

It's cheaper for many small reads and dearer for storage. The Realtime Database bills $5 per GB stored and $1 per GB downloaded, with no charge per read. Firestore bills about $0.15 per GiB stored and $0.03 per 100,000 reads. Chat and presence apps that send many small updates often cost less on the Realtime Database.

What is the Firebase $300 credit?

It's the Google Cloud free trial credit, offered to eligible new accounts when they upgrade to Blaze. Linking a billing account that carries the credit upgrades the project to Blaze automatically. What happens after the credit runs out depends on the credit program, so check it in the Google Cloud console.

How I checked

I checked every price on 2026-10-08 on Firebase's and Google Cloud's own pricing pages and docs, linked next to each number. Firestore rates are for us-central1; the multi-region locations nam5 and eur3 cost twice as much per read and write. The three apps are my assumptions, run through the calculator on this page, which leaves out Cloud Functions compute past the free tier. Supabase prices are from its pricing page, server prices from Hetzner's price list and Netcup's VPS page, all checked the same day. I build Ployz, which is mentioned in this article as one option.

Deploy your backend to your own server with Ployz, free.