Firebase's free Spark plan lost Cloud Storage in February 2026, and Firebase Studio shuts down on March 22, 2027. Compare free alternatives with exact tier limits: Supabase, Appwrite, PocketBase, Nhost, Convex, Back4App, Hasura.
Firebase — Google's all-in-one Backend-as-a-Service — is facing developer trust issues in 2026. Google announced on March 19, 2026 that Firebase Studio will shut down: it has taken no new workspaces since June 22, 2026, and it closes, deleting all remaining data, on March 22, 2027. Since February 3, 2026, Cloud Storage for Firebase requires the pay-as-you-go Blaze plan, and a Spark project has no access to any bucket, including its default one.
Developer sentiment is increasingly negative: "building on Google products is always a gamble." The Spark free tier still exists for new projects, but the pattern of forced migrations and product shutdowns is driving developers to open-source, self-hostable alternatives.
Below are the best free Firebase alternatives, compared by what you actually get for free — exact storage, MAU, bandwidth, and function limits. Not marketing copy.
Limits Reduced
Cloud Storage for Firebase now requires the pay-as-you-go Blaze plan, in effect from February 3, 2026. Projects on the no-cost Spark plan lose access to all Cloud Storage buckets, including default buckets; console access redirects to an upgrade page and API calls return 402 or 403. Provisioning a new default bucket also requires Blaze. Source ↗
Before: Spark plan included Cloud Storage with a *.appspot.com default bucket and no card required: 5 GB stored, 1 GB downloaded/day, 20,000 uploads/day, 50,000 downloads/day After: Any Cloud Storage access requires the Blaze plan and a billing account. No-cost usage continues on Blaze: a legacy *.appspot.com default bucket keeps 5 GB stored, 1 GB downloaded/day, 20,000 uploads/day, 50,000 downloads/day; default buckets created after September 2024 are *.firebasestorage.app and follow Google Cloud Storage pricing with its Always Free tier in US-CENTRAL1, US-EAST1 and US-WEST1. Other Spark limits unchanged (Firestore, Auth, Hosting)
Postgres development platform: database, Auth, Storage, Realtime and Edge Functions. The Free plan is $0: unlimited API requests, 50,000 monthly active users, a 500 MB database on a shared CPU with 500 MB RAM, 5 GB egress plus 5 GB cached egress, 1 GB file storage, 500,000 Edge Function invocations, and Realtime with 200 concurrent connections and 2 million messages a month. Free projects are paused after 1 week of inactivity, with a limit of 2 active projects. Pro starts at $25 a month for the first project and includes $10 a month of compute credits, enough for one Micro instance.
Open-source BaaS — 75K MAU, 2 GB storage, 750K function executions/month, 5 GB bandwidth, 1 database, 1 bucket and 2 functions per project. Limit of 2 projects. Projects pause after 1 week of inactivity and are deleted after 90 days paused
Open-source backend with Postgres and Hasura GraphQL, plus Auth, Storage and Functions. The Starter plan is $0 a month: 1 GB database, 1 GB storage and 5 GB egress, with functions, realtime APIs and unlimited users. It is limited to 1 project, and the project is paused after 1 week of inactivity. Pro starts at $25 a month with $15 of compute credits, a 10 GB database, 50 GB storage and 50 GB egress.
Open-source backend in a single Go binary — SQLite database, real-time subscriptions, built-in auth (email, OAuth2), file storage (S3-compatible), REST API. Completely free and self-hosted, no vendor lock-in. Single executable, no dependenciesThe page we cite for this offer states no amount, tier or rate we can read when we last looked, on 2026-09-16, so we cannot confirm these terms today.
Instant GraphQL API engine over any database — Includes: Unlimited models, at any scale 1 supergraph developer Observability: 15-minute retention API GraphQL API (filtering, pagination, sorting, aggregations) Relay API Nested filtering Nested aggregations Nested pagination Nested sorting API versioning Field & entity level authorization Infrastructure API requests/month - No limit Concurrent API users - No limit Autoscaling Zero cold-start Global Edge network Intelligent geo routing DDoS protection Connectors Database connectors Code connectors API connectors DIY: build & connect your own connector Optional hosting for third-party & code connectors - $0.075/vCPU-hour, $0.0075/GiB-hour Console Supergraph explorer & registry Query plan & trace viewer CI/CD Breaking change detection Immutable builds & build URLs Local development Self-hosting with v3 graphql-engine Collaboration Schema registry & changelog
What you actually get for free on each platform. Firebase Spark is generous on paper but lacks billing caps on Blaze — one misconfigured query can cost hundreds.
PocketBase limits are "unlimited" because it's self-hosted — actual limits depend on your server hardware. Hasura is a GraphQL engine that sits on top of your own Postgres database. Appwrite projects pause after 1 week of inactivity on the free tier. Firebase Spark has no billing caps if you upgrade to Blaze.
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