What is the best database for a SaaS app?
Prices read from each vendor's own pricing page on 28 August 2026.
Almost every comparison of these answers the wrong question. Speed and scale are not what decides this for a SaaS app at the start, because none of these will be your bottleneck at a thousand users. What decides it is how much of your application you hand to the vendor, and how much of it you would have to rewrite to leave.
That is the split. Supabase, Neon and Prisma Postgres are Postgres, so moving is an export and an import. Firebase and Convex have their own data models, which buy you real things and cost you the exit. Both are defensible. Picking one without noticing you picked is not.
The second thing worth knowing before you choose is what an idle project costs, because most side projects are idle most of the time, and the answers differ more than the headline prices suggest.
Our pick
It is standard Postgres, so leaving is a pg_dump rather than a rewrite, and auth, file storage, realtime and edge functions are in the same project rather than three more vendors. The catch is honest and worth knowing: free projects pause after a week of inactivity, and once you outgrow the $10 credit, compute is billed on top of the $25, so Pro is a floor rather than a price.
What we judged on
- How hard it is to leave, measured honestly: an export, or a rewrite
- What an idle or low-traffic project costs each month
- Whether auth, file storage and functions come with it or arrive as more bills
- What the free tier does when you stop looking at it for a week
Also worth it
Also plain Postgres, and compute scales to zero, so an idle project costs nothing at all. Database branching means every preview deploy can have its own copy of the data, which is the single nicest thing on this list to work with. It has been owned by Databricks since 2025, so the roadmap is somebody else's.
If your whole team writes TypeScript and the app is realtime, reactive queries remove a layer of websocket plumbing you would otherwise write and maintain. Priced per developer above the free tier, so a team of four is $100 a month before any usage, and the data model is proprietary.
Firebase's shape without Google owning the data model, and properly open source, so self-hosting is a supported path rather than a theory. Smaller hosted business than Supabase, which means fewer people have already hit the problem you are about to hit.
Not for this job
Not because it is bad. Offline sync and realtime on mobile are still the best here, and the free tier never expires. But Firestore is a proprietary document store, so leaving Firebase means rewriting your data layer rather than exporting it, and Blaze bills usage with no cap turned on by default. Choose it for the mobile sync, with both of those in mind.
Prices, side by side
| Tool | From | Free tier |
|---|---|---|
| Supabase | Free, then $25/mo | Free plan: 500 MB database, 5 GB egress, 50,000 monthly active users, 2 projects. Projects pause after a week idle. |
| Neon | Free, then pay per use | Free plan: 0.5 GB storage per project, 100 compute-hours, 10 branches, up to 100 projects, no card required. |
| Convex | Free, then $25/mo | Free and Starter plan: 25M function calls, 50 GB database storage, 100 GB file storage, up to 6 developers. |
| Appwrite | Free, then $25/mo | Free plan: 2 GB storage, 5 GB bandwidth, 750K executions, 75,000 monthly active users, 2 projects. Paused after a week idle. |
| Firebase | Free, then pay per use | Spark plan is free forever: 1 GiB Firestore storage, 50K document reads and 20K writes a day, 50K auth users, 10 GB hosting. |
Read on 28 August 2026. Every price change we have recorded.
Questions people ask
Is Supabase actually free?
There is a real free plan: 500 MB of database, 5 GB egress, 50,000 monthly active users and two projects. The thing that catches people out is that free projects pause after a week of inactivity, which is fine for something you work on daily and annoying for a side project you visit monthly.
What is the cheapest database here?
Turso at $4.99 a month is the cheapest paid tier in the category. Neon and Cloudflare D1 can cost nothing at all when idle because they bill by usage rather than a monthly floor, which for a low-traffic app is cheaper still.
Do I need Postgres, or is SQLite enough?
For a normal SaaS app with one writer at a time, SQLite-based options like Turso and Cloudflare D1 are genuinely enough and cheaper. The constraint to check first is writes: SQLite's model allows one writer at a time per database, so a write-heavy multi-tenant app wants Postgres.
This is one question about databases. See all 12 compared, or browse the other guides.