StackBest databases & backend-as-a-service for solo founders
Your database is the one piece of infrastructure you cannot easily swap later, and the pricing models vary wildly: some charge a flat monthly fee, some bill per row read, some bill per compute hour. For a solo founder the real questions are simple: what does it cost at zero users, what does it cost at your first 1,000 users, and will the free tier pause or throttle your app while you sleep. This audit covers the eight options indie hackers actually pick between in 2026, with the real numbers and the traps.
| Tool | Free tier | Paid from | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
 Supabase$25/mo | $25/mo | Solo founders who want auth, storage, and Postgres in one product and expect to reach paying users on the $25 plan. | |
 Firebaseusage-based from $0 | usage-based from $0 | Solo founders shipping a mobile-first app who will keep read patterns disciplined and want a true $0 idle cost. | |
 Neonusage-based from $0.106/CU-hour | usage-based from $0.106/CU-hour | Solo founders on Vercel or serverless stacks who want real Postgres with a true zero idle cost and usage-based growth. | |
 Turso$4.99/mo | $4.99/mo | Solo founders building read-heavy or multi-tenant apps who want the lowest possible bill and are comfortable with SQLite. | |
 PlanetScale$5/mo | $5/mo | Solo founders who value operational excellence and predictable node-based pricing over a free tier or bundled services. | |
 Convex$25/developer/mo | $25/developer/mo | Solo TypeScript founders building realtime or collaborative apps who value development speed over data portability. | |
 MongoDB Atlas$8/mo | $8/mo | Solo founders already committed to the document model or building AI features who want a capped-cost dev tier. | |
 PocketBase$0 | $0 | Cost-obsessed founders comfortable with a VPS who want a full backend for the price of a coffee per month. |
Default pick for a solo founder: Supabase Free while validating, then Pro at $25/mo once you have real users, because the bundled auth and storage replace services you would otherwise pay for separately. If your app is idle most of the time or lives on Vercel, Neon's scale-to-zero gets you real Postgres for $0 to $10/mo, and Turso at $4.99/mo wins if you are read-heavy and fine with SQLite.
Skip Firebase unless you are mobile-first and disciplined about read patterns, and skip Convex seat pricing until you are sure you will stay solo. Switch away from your free tier the week a pause, throttle, or missing backup could cost you a paying customer; realistic all-in database spend for a first profitable indie app is $5 to $30/mo.
SupabaseDefault pickFree tierAsk about these tools
The fine print, tool by tool
Supabase$25/mo+
A hosted Postgres backend that bundles auth, file storage, realtime, and edge functions behind one dashboard. A solo founder picks it when they want a full app backend without paying for a separate auth or storage service.
$25/mo (Pro)
500 MB database, 50K monthly active users, 1 GB file storage, 5 GB egress, 2 active projects. Free projects pause after 1 week of inactivity.
Pro is $25/mo billed upfront with overages at month end: $0.00325 per MAU past 100K, $0.125/GB database past 8 GB, $0.09/GB egress past 250 GB. Spend cap on by default. Each extra project needs its own compute instance from $10/mo. Free tier pauses after 1 week idle and caps you at 2 active projects. The jump past Pro is Team at $599/mo.
- + Full backend in one bill: Postgres, auth, storage, realtime, and edge functions, so you skip paying for a separate auth provider
- + Pro at $25/mo covers 100K MAUs and 8 GB database, which carries most indie apps well past their first revenue
- + Real Postgres with full SQL, extensions, and row-level security, so no vendor query language lock-in
- − Free-tier projects pause after 7 days of inactivity, so a side project with no visitors goes down until you manually restore it
- − The $25 Pro plan includes only a $10 Micro compute credit; every additional active project adds at least $10/mo compute
Firebaseusage-based from $0+
Google's app backend built around the Firestore document database, with auth, hosting, functions, and push notifications included. A solo founder picks it when shipping a mobile app and wanting a true $0 idle cost with SDKs that handle offline sync.
usage-based from $0 (Blaze pay-as-you-go)
Firestore: 1 GiB storage, 50K reads/day, 20K writes/day. Hosting: 10 GB storage, 360 MB/day transfer. Auth: 50K MAUs. No project pausing. Cloud Functions is not available on Spark at all; its 2M free invocations/mo only apply once you upgrade to Blaze.
Spark (free) cannot deploy Cloud Functions at all; you need Blaze with a credit card, which removes any hard ceiling. On Blaze, Functions include 2M free invocations/mo then $0.40 per million, plus 5 GB/mo free outbound networking then $0.12/GB. Watch Firestore reads: one dashboard screen refreshing a 1,000-document collection every minute is about 43M reads/mo, roughly $26 on its own. Hosting egress at $0.15/GB past limits. Eligible new Blaze users get $300 in credit.
- + Free Spark quotas are generous and never pause, so a low-traffic app can run at exactly $0 indefinitely
- + 50K free auth MAUs plus free push notifications (FCM) replace paid auth and messaging tools
- + Best-in-class mobile SDKs with offline sync, ideal if your product ships as an iOS or Android app
- − Firestore bills per document operation (roughly $0.06 per 100K reads, $0.18 per 100K writes), so a chatty listener or unoptimized query can multiply your bill silently
- − No hard spend cap on Blaze; budget alerts notify you but do not stop the meter, and runaway-bill stories are common
Neonusage-based from $0.106/CU-hour+
Serverless Postgres that scales compute to zero when idle and bills by the compute hour. A solo founder picks it when the app runs on Vercel or another serverless stack and sits idle most of the day.
usage-based from $0.106/CU-hour (Launch)
100 compute-hours/mo per project, 0.5 GB storage, 10 branches, autoscaling to 2 CU, 5 GB egress, 60K auth MAUs. Scale-to-zero after 5 minutes.
Launch is pure pay-as-you-go: $0.106 per CU-hour compute plus $0.35/GB-month storage, 500 GB egress included then $0.10/GB. Extra branches $1.50/branch-month prorated hourly. The free plan hard-stops at 100 CU-hours/mo per project; a database kept awake 24/7 at the minimum 0.25 CU burns about 180 CU-hours, so always-on apps outgrow free in half a month. Scale plan compute is $0.222/CU-hour.
- + Scale-to-zero means an idle database costs literally $0 in compute, perfect for side projects and staging
- + Copy-on-write branching: spin up a full database branch for a preview deploy at no upfront cost
- + Launch plan has no monthly minimum; a small app might bill $5 to $15/mo total, and invoices under $0.50 are not even collected
- − Hitting any free-tier monthly limit suspends compute until the next billing month, taking your app down, not just throttling it
- − Storage at $0.35/GB-month is nearly 3x Supabase's $0.125/GB overage rate, and you still need auth, file storage, and functions elsewhere
Turso$4.99/mo+
A hosted SQLite platform billed by rows read and written, built for running thousands of small databases. A solo founder picks it when the app is read heavy or needs one database per customer and the bill has to stay tiny.
$4.99/mo (Developer)
100 databases, 5 GB storage, 500M rows read/mo, 10M rows written/mo, 3 GB syncs, 1-day point-in-time restore. No credit card required.
Developer at $4.99/mo includes 9 GB storage (+$0.75/GB), 2.5B row reads (+$1/billion), 25M row writes (+$1/million). Note the asymmetry: reads overage is per billion, writes overage is per million. A single full-table scan on a 1M-row table counts as 1M row reads, so missing indexes directly inflate the bill. Next tier jumps to $24.92/mo (Scaler).
- + Cheapest paid entry in the category at $4.99/mo, and the free tier's 5 GB storage beats Supabase and Neon combined
- + Database-per-user patterns: 100 free databases, unlimited on paid plans
- + Row-based billing is predictable for read-heavy apps: 500M free row reads is a lot of page views
- − Write overage on Developer is $1 per million rows written past 25M, while reads bill $1 per billion, so write-heavy workloads (analytics, logging) get expensive fast
- − SQLite dialect, so no Postgres extensions, no stored procedures, and auth, file storage, and functions all need separate services
PlanetScale$5/mo+
A managed database company from the team behind Vitess, selling Postgres and MySQL on fixed-price nodes with a schema-migration workflow. A solo founder picks it for predictable node pricing and operational reliability over a free tier.
$5/mo (PS-5 single node Postgres)
Cheapest is PS-5 at $5/mo, single node, no high availability. HA 3-node starts at $15/mo. Total bill = cluster + EBS storage + backups + egress + optional PgBouncer and replicas, so budget roughly 1.5x the node price. ARM instances run 10 to 20 percent cheaper than x86. Prices shown are AWS us-east-1; other regions cost more.
- + Entry price of $5/mo for a single-node Postgres instance (512 MiB RAM), viable for solo founders
- + Battle-tested operational story: this is the Vitess team that ran YouTube-scale MySQL, now applied to Postgres
- + First-class branching and safe schema-migration workflow catches bad deploys before they hit production
- − No free tier at all (removed in 2024), so even a dead side project costs $5/mo forever
- − The $5 plan is non-HA single node with 1/16 vCPU; high availability triples the price to $15/mo, and storage, backups, and egress bill on top
Convex$25/developer/mo+
A backend platform where your database queries are TypeScript functions that push updates to the UI in real time. A solo founder picks it when building a collaborative or realtime app alone and wanting to skip websocket and cache-invalidation code.
$25/developer/mo (Professional)
1M function calls/mo, 0.5 GB database storage, 1 GB file storage, 1 GB egress, then pay-as-you-go on Starter.
Pro is $25 per developer per month, so seat math matters even at team size two. Pro includes 25M function calls and 50 GB database storage; overages are $2 per million calls, $0.20/GB storage, $0.12/GB egress. The free Starter tier bills usage past included limits ($2.20 per million calls, $0.22/GB storage) rather than pausing. Business jumps to a $2,500/mo minimum.
- + Reactive queries give you realtime UI updates for free, with no websocket or cache-invalidation code to write
- + Everything is TypeScript end to end, including server functions and schema, so a solo dev moves very fast
- + Free tier converts to pay-as-you-go instead of hard-stopping, so growth does not take your app down
- − Per-developer pricing: the moment you add a co-founder or contractor, Pro doubles to $50/mo before any usage
- − Proprietary database and query model, so migrating off Convex means rewriting your entire data layer
MongoDB Atlas$8/mo+
The managed cloud version of the MongoDB document database, with vector search built in. A solo founder picks it when the data fits the document model or the app needs AI search, and a hard-capped dev tier matters.
$8/mo (Flex, usage-capped at $30/mo)
M0 cluster: 512 MB storage, shared CPU and RAM, capped at 100 operations/second, no backups. Free forever, no pausing.
Flex bills $0.011/hour scaling with ops/second: $8/mo under 100 ops/sec up to a $30/mo hard cap at 400-500 ops/sec. Dedicated M10 starts at $0.08/hour, about $57/mo, before backups and egress. Free and Flex tiers skip egress charges; dedicated tiers pay egress, and cross-region traffic costs more. No backups on M0.
- + Free M0 cluster never pauses and never expires, so a prototype can live there indefinitely
- + Flex tier has a built-in ceiling: $8/mo minimum, hard-capped at $30/mo no matter the traffic, which is rare cost safety
- + Document model plus built-in vector search suits AI apps without adding a separate vector database
- − The step from Flex ($30 max) to dedicated M10 (about $57/mo) is the real production price, with egress, backups, and Atlas Search billed on top
- − Free M0 has no backup at all, so your data has zero recovery story until you pay
PocketBase$0+
An open source backend that ships as one Go binary: SQLite, auth, file storage, realtime, and an admin UI. A solo founder picks it when running a $5 VPS themselves beats paying usage-based bills, and full data ownership matters.
$0 (open source; ~$4-6/mo for a VPS to run it)
Everything. The entire product is a free open-source single binary: SQLite database, auth with OAuth2, file storage, realtime subscriptions, and an admin UI.
Open source and genuinely free; there is no paid tier or official hosting to upsell you. The hidden cost is your time: budget a few hours for initial VPS setup, automated SQLite backups (Litestream is the common pairing), and update discipline. Factor your hourly rate honestly before calling it the cheapest option.
- + Total software cost is $0 forever; your only bill is a small VPS, around $4 to $6/mo on Hetzner or DigitalOcean
- + One binary with zero dependencies: auth, realtime, file storage, and admin dashboard included, deployable in minutes
- + Your data is a plain SQLite file on your own server, the strongest exit story in this list
- − You are the ops team: backups, TLS, monitoring, updates, and security patching are all on you, with no managed hosting or support contract
- − Pre-1.0 software (v0.39.x) run as a volunteer side project, still shipping breaking changes between releases
[ Partnerships ] Building a tool solo founders should know about?
DM @monjodavKnow what your whole stack costs
StackTracker adds up every one of these, plus your hours.
Start tracking · $9/mo