Firebase Pricing
Explained: What It Really Costs
Spark plan is free with fixed quotas. Exceeding any quota forces an upgrade to the metered, uncapped Blaze plan.
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Firebase Plans & What They Include
Firebase's Spark plan is free with fixed quotas, which is generous for tiny apps. The moment you exceed a quota you must move to the Blaze plan, which is pure pay-as-you-go with no upper bound, reads, writes, storage, bandwidth and function invocations are all metered.
The free-to-Blaze cliff is where bills surprise people: a single misconfigured query loop or a traffic spike on Firestore can generate a four-figure invoice because there is no hard spending cap, only budget alerts.
Fixed quotas: limited Firestore reads/writes, storage and hosting.
No quotas, no cap. Every operation is billed by usage.
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Add-ons & Metered Costs
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Hidden Costs of Firebase
The free-to-Blaze cliff
Spark is free until you hit a quota, then you must switch to Blaze, which has no spending limit. There is no middle 'cheap fixed' tier.
Per-operation billing is unforgiving
Firestore charges per document read and write. A misconfigured listener or an N+1 query pattern can generate enormous, sudden charges.
Budget alerts are not caps
Firebase only warns you after spend happens: it does not stop charges. A runaway function can bill thousands before you react.
Runsite gives you a managed Postgres and full-stack hosting with a permanent free tier and a true hard spending cap, the bill physically cannot exceed your limit, unlike Blaze's uncapped metering.
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Runsite vs Firebase
Side-by-side. No marketing fluff, just facts.
| Feature | Runsite | Firebase |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor Lock-in | ✓ Open standards, Docker | ✗ Proprietary SDKs |
| EU Data Centers | ✓ Frankfurt (eu-central) | ✓ europe-west regions |
| GDPR Compliance | ✓ EU entity, full compliance | Complex DPA required |
| Backend Hosting | ✓ Full containers | Cloud Functions only |
| Database | ✓ Standard PostgreSQL | Firestore (proprietary) |
| Pricing Transparency | ✓ Fixed plans | Pay-per-read/write |
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Firebase vs Runsite: What You Need to Know
Firebase's free Spark tier is great for prototypes, but the jump to uncapped Blaze billing and per-operation Firestore pricing make it one of the riskiest platforms for unexpected bills, there is no hard spending cap, only after-the-fact alerts.
Pricing FAQ
Firebase Pricing: Common Questions
Is Firebase free?
The Spark plan is free with fixed quotas. Once you exceed any quota, you must upgrade to the Blaze plan, which is pay-as-you-go with no spending limit. So Firebase is free only until you outgrow the quotas.
Why are Firebase bills sometimes huge?
Firestore bills per document read and write, and the Blaze plan has no hard spending cap. A misconfigured query, an infinite listener loop, or a traffic spike can generate a very large bill before budget alerts even reach you.
Does Firebase have a spending limit?
No true hard cap. Firebase offers budget alerts, but they notify you after spend occurs rather than stopping charges. To enforce a real limit you need a platform like Runsite where the cap physically prevents overage.
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Keep exploring
Predictable Pricing — in EUR, with a Hard Cap
A permanent free tier and spending limits you actually control. The opposite of a surprise Firebase bill.
Start Free on Runsite →