Supabase pricing: usage quotas and the spend cap — Hovvi

What happened

State every allowance and marginal rate on one page and ship the spend cap enabled so scaling past the plan is a deliberate act. Publish each meter's free boundary, included allowance and marginal rate, then bound total exposure with a default-on spend cap.

Evidence

Observed facts

• The Free plan includes 50,000 monthly active users, 500 MB database, 5 GB egress and 1 GB file storage at $0, limited to two active projects and paused after one week of inactivity.
• The Pro plan starts at $25 per month with the first project included and additional projects from $10 per month, 100,000 monthly active users then $0.00325 per additional MAU, 8 GB database disk then $0.125 per additional GB and 250 GB bandwidth.
• Paid plans include $10 per month of compute credits described as enough to cover one Micro instance, and compute instances are billed hourly.
• The Pro plan has a spend cap enabled by default to keep costs under control; scaling beyond the plan's included quota requires explicitly switching the spend cap off.
• The pricing page exposes Copy as Markdown, Ask ChatGPT and Ask Claude actions that hand the pricing table to agents in machine-readable form.

Editorial inference

• A default-on ceiling converts usage pricing from a trust problem into a bounded choice; Hovvi should pair published retrieval quotas with a default usage limit and agent-readable rate tables.

Evidence views

1. Plan boundary
2. Meter definition
3. Worked compute example
4. Spend cap control
5. Agent-readable rate table

Founder takeaway

Publish every meter and rate, then make the cost ceiling the default so scaling is a deliberate act.

Use when

• Usage spans several independently measured meters
• Surprise bills are a known adoption blocker

Avoid when

• The product cannot enforce a spending ceiling
• Meters are too interdependent to state marginal rates

Next implementation step

Design a backend pricing experience that explains every usage meter, its marginal rate and a default cost ceiling before scaling.

Acceptance criteria

• A founder can state the free boundary and each Pro meter without opening documentation
• A worked example reconciles the compute credit, hourly billing and instance coverage
• The spend cap is presented as enabled by default with an explicit opt-out
• Marginal rates appear beside their allowances on the same surface
• Historical rates cannot appear without their observation date

Related cases

• First project to its meter: Supabase project activation flow — Hovvi

  The activation flow stops at the account boundary while the pricing case explains the quotas, marginal rates and default-on spend cap that govern the project a new account creates.

Version history

Current snapshot: snap_supabase_pricing_2026_08_25 — Added the Supabase pricing dossier: named free quotas, published Pro allowances and marginal rates, hourly compute credits, the default-on spend cap and agent-readable pricing actions.

Use with an Agent

Example read-only MCP query: