What backend-as-a-service costs after free tier
7 July 2026· 7 min read · by Stackbastion
Your app worked fine on your backend-as-a-service platform’s free tier for months. Then you got an email about your project being paused, or your bill jumped, or you hit a limit you didn’t know existed. Now you’re trying to work out what the platform costs for real, past the free plan, before you commit to it as your production database.
Here’s the honest breakdown. This class of platform is a good product, and the free tier is genuinely useful. But the jump from free to production comes with a few surprises that don’t show up on the pricing page headline.
The three tiers, roughly
The platform sells plans, but the plan is only part of the bill. The rest is usage on top.
| Plan | Base price | What you get | Who it’s for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | €0 | 1 project active, 500MB database, pauses after 1 week idle | Prototypes, demos |
| Pro | ~$25/mo | No pausing, 8GB database included, daily backups (7-day) | Small live apps |
| Team | ~$599/mo | SOC 2, SSO, priority support | Companies with compliance needs |
| Enterprise | Custom | Dedicated support, custom terms | Larger orgs |
Most solo founders and small teams live on the Pro tier. So let’s talk about what Pro actually costs once your app has real users, because the $25 is a starting line, not the whole race.
Where the Pro bill actually goes
Pro is $25 a month for the base. On top of that, the platform charges for usage above the included amounts. The lines that catch people out:
- Database size. Pro includes 8GB. Past that, you pay per GB per month. A chatty app with lots of rows, logs, or uploaded metadata can cross 8GB faster than you’d think.
- Egress (bandwidth). Pro includes a set amount of outbound data. Serve images or files through the platform’s storage, or run a busy API, and you can blow past it. Overage is billed per GB.
- Storage. Files you upload count separately from the database. Included allowance, then per-GB after.
- Monthly active users (auth). The platform’s auth service includes a large number of monthly active users on Pro, but a consumer app with tens of thousands of users can move into paid territory.
- Compute add-on. The default Pro instance is small. Under real load you’ll likely upgrade the compute tier, which is a flat monthly add-on. This is the big one people miss. The base “$25” runs on a micro instance that struggles under production traffic.
- Point-in-time recovery. PITR is a paid add-on on top of Pro. The daily backups included with Pro only go back 7 days, and they’re snapshots, not point-in-time. If you want to restore to a specific minute before a bad migration, that’s extra.
So a realistic “small but real” bill on the platform often lands around $60 to $120 a month once you’ve upgraded compute and added a bit of storage and egress. Not $25. Still reasonable, but know the real number before you build your budget on the headline.
The two costs that aren’t on the pricing page
Backups that go far enough back. The 7-day daily backups on Pro are fine for “oops, I deleted a row yesterday.” They are not fine for “we discovered a data corruption bug that started three weeks ago.” For that you need PITR and a longer retention, which is a paid tier. Plenty of people don’t notice this until they need a restore and find the window is too short. We wrote more on why the restore test matters more than the backup.
Getting off the platform later. It runs on real Postgres, which is genuinely good news: your data isn’t trapped in a proprietary format. But your app probably leans on platform-specific pieces like the built-in auth service, Row Level Security policies, file storage, and edge functions. Moving off means re-homing those, not just running pg_dump. The database migrates cleanly. The auth and storage layers are the work. We covered the auth side in migrating a Lovable app’s auth.
The platform vs a plain managed Postgres
If all you need is a database, the platform bundles a lot you might not use. Here’s the rough trade against a bare managed Postgres.
| Backend-as-a-service platform, paid tier | Plain managed Postgres (serverless provider, big cloud, self-hosted) | |
|---|---|---|
| Base cost | ~$25 + usage + compute | Varies, often less for just DB |
| Auth, Storage, Realtime | Included | You build or buy separately |
| Backups | 7-day snapshots, PITR extra | Depends on provider |
| Lock-in risk | Low on DB, medium on the extras | Low |
| Best when | You want the whole toolkit | You just want a solid database |
The platform wins when you’re using the full stack: auth, storage, realtime, the dashboard. You’re paying for a toolkit and using it. It’s a worse deal when all you actually need is a Postgres database and you’re paying for a stack of features you don’t touch. At that point a leaner managed Postgres, or a self-hosted one, is cheaper.
A quick way to sanity-check your bill
Before you assume the platform is too expensive, open the usage breakdown in your project dashboard and find the single biggest line. It’s usually one of three things: the compute add-on, egress, or database size. Each has a different fix.
- Compute dominating? That’s the plan working as intended under load. The question is whether a flat server would be cheaper for your steady traffic. Often yes.
- Egress dominating? You’re probably serving files or images through the platform’s storage. Move those to a CDN and the line drops.
- Database size dominating? Check for tables that grow without bound, like logs or event rows you never prune. A retention policy can claw back a lot.
Fix the top line first. People churn off a provider over a bill that one config change would have halved, and then carry the same waste to the next host.
Or, we do it for you
If your bill is climbing and you mostly need a solid, backed-up Postgres with a real restore path, we run exactly that: Postgres 17 on a VPS, tested backups with point-in-time recovery, monitoring, and a named human on call, at a flat monthly price. See our pricing.
FAQ
Is the free tier actually free forever?
For a genuinely idle project, mostly yes, but it pauses after about a week of inactivity and has hard limits on database size and projects. It’s built for prototypes and demos, not for a live app with paying users. The moment you need it to stay awake and backed up, you’re on the paid tier.
Why is my bill higher than $25?
Almost always the compute add-on plus usage overages. The base Pro plan runs on a small instance that most production apps outgrow, so you upgrade compute, which is a flat monthly charge. Add egress, extra storage, and PITR, and the real bill is often two to four times the headline.
Does the platform include point-in-time recovery?
Not on the base Pro plan. Pro gives you daily snapshot backups kept for 7 days. Point-in-time recovery, which lets you restore to a specific moment, is a paid add-on, and longer retention costs more. If your data matters, budget for it rather than assuming the included backups are enough.
Can I move my data off the platform if I need to?
The database yes, easily, because it’s standard Postgres you can pg_dump and restore anywhere. The harder part is everything built on top: the auth service, storage, Row Level Security, and edge functions are platform-specific and have to be re-homed. Plan the migration around those pieces, not the raw data.
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