Firebase Pricing Explained (Free Limits and Real Costs)

Firebase pricing has two plans: Spark, which is free and needs no payment method, and Blaze, which is pay as you go and includes the same free quotas before charging. On Spark you get 1 GiB of Firestore storage, 50,000 document reads and 20,000 writes a day, and 10 GB of Hosting storage; Cloud Storage and Cloud Functions need Blaze. Most Blaze bills are driven by Firestore reads, file downloads and Functions, and Blaze has no general spending cap.

All figures here are as of November 2026, from firebase.google.com/pricing, the Firestore pricing docs and Google Cloud's pricing pages. Prices for some products vary by region; we note where.

#Spark vs Blaze in one table

Free quotas apply per project, not per app.

#Firebase free limits, product by product

#Cloud Firestore (Standard edition)

Daily quotas reset around midnight Pacific time. Only one free database per project: named (non-default) databases require billing.

Above the free quota on Blaze, the rates listed on Google Cloud's Firestore pricing page for a single region are $0.03 per 100,000 reads, $0.09 per 100,000 writes and $0.01 per 100,000 deletes, with storage at about $0.15 per GiB-month. Multi-region locations and some regions cost more, so check your database's location.

#Realtime Database

#Cloud Storage for Firebase

Since February 3, 2026, Cloud Storage for Firebase requires the Blaze plan for default buckets. Spark projects with an existing appspot.com bucket lost read and write access to it until they upgrade; the data stays in the bucket. On Blaze:

Free quotas for new buckets only apply in us-central1, us-west1 and us-east1. A bucket in Europe pays from the first GB.

#Authentication

The MAU tiers come from Google Cloud's Identity Platform pricing, which Firebase links to. SMS prices vary a lot by country; check the destination countries you expect.

#Hosting

10 GB of storage and 360 MB per day of transfer free on both plans. Above that on Blaze: $0.026 per GB stored and $0.15 per GB transferred.

#Cloud Functions (Blaze only)

#Data Connect (Postgres)

Firebase's Postgres option runs on Cloud SQL. On Blaze the first default Cloud SQL instance has a 3-month trial; after that, the page lists pricing starting at about $9.37 a month, varying by region. Data Connect operations include 250,000 per month free, then $0.90 per million.

#How much free storage does Firebase give you?

Adding it up for a Spark project: 1 GiB in Firestore, 1 GB in Realtime Database and 10 GB for Hosting. Cloud Storage for user files is no longer part of Spark; on Blaze it includes 5 GB. So for an app that stores user uploads, the honest answer is "5 GB, on the paid plan".

#How many free projects can you have?

Firebase doesn't publish a fixed number. Its FAQ says project creation is limited to a small number, "usually around 5-10", and that the quota may grow once a Cloud Billing account in good standing is linked. Deleted projects keep counting toward the quota for 30 days, until they are fully deleted.

#What Firestore reads really cost: a worked example

Firestore bills per document read, not per query, so the number to estimate is how many documents your screens load.

Take an app with 2,000 daily active users. Each opens the home feed 8 times a day, and the feed loads 25 documents. A listener keeps it updated, and on average 10 documents in a feed change while it's open.

• Reads per day: 2,000 × 8 × (25 + 10) = 560,000
• Over the free 50,000: 510,000 a day, about 15.3 million a month
• Cost: 153 × $0.03 = about $4.60 a month in reads (single-region rate)

That's cheap. The bill grows when the multipliers do:

• Listeners on large result sets. Every added or changed document in a listened-to query is a read.
• Offsets. You're charged a read for each skipped document, so deep pagination with offset gets expensive. Use cursors.
• Security Rules lookups. get() and exists() in rules are charged as extra reads.
• Queries with no results still cost one read each.
• Fan-out writes. Denormalized data means one change can mean dozens of writes at $0.09 per 100,000.

Multiply the example by 50 (100,000 daily users) and reads alone pass $230 a month, before writes, egress, Functions and Storage downloads. Not ruinous, but it scales with usage in ways that are hard to predict from a dashboard.

#The cap question

Blaze has budget alerts, but Firebase's FAQ is explicit: budget alerts do not cap your usage or charges. Spend caps exist only for a few products (Firebase AI Logic, App Hosting, Cloud Functions for Firebase and Extensions), where reaching the budget pauses new usage. For Firestore, Storage and the rest, you can't cap usage on Blaze.

In practice, teams protect themselves with:

• Budget alerts at several thresholds, sent to someone who will act on them
• App Check and tight Security Rules, so nobody can script reads against your database
• Cursor-based pagination and limits on every query
• Spend caps on the products that support them, such as Cloud Functions

#Where Firebase pricing is a good deal

For small apps it's hard to beat: generous daily quotas, no card on Spark, excellent mobile SDKs with offline support, and 50,000 free monthly active users. If your app reads little and writes little, Blaze bills of a few dollars a month are normal. Firebase also bundles other app services, such as Hosting and Authentication, in the same console.

#A fixed-price alternative

If you'd rather pay a known monthly amount than per document, a Postgres backend with plan-based limits is the other model. StitchDB, as an example, doesn't meter reads or writes: you pay for the plan, and limits are on database size, egress, users and functions (plans and limits). As of November 2026:

Paid plans start with a spend cap on, so usage stops at the included amounts unless you turn it off; overage is then charged from prepaid credit with a monthly limit (spend cap). File storage is part of the Free plan, and Free projects are not paused for inactivity unless the whole account goes unused for a year (inactive projects).

The trade-offs are real: StitchDB is SQL, not a document store, so moving from Firestore means modeling data as tables (Firestore vs Postgres); it hosts in the EU only; and it's a younger platform with a smaller ecosystem than Firebase. If you're weighing a move, migrate Firebase to Postgres covers the steps.

#FAQ

#Is Firebase free?

The Spark plan is free with daily and monthly quotas and needs no card. Cloud Storage, Cloud Functions and phone auth require the Blaze plan.

#How much does Firebase cost per month?

Blaze charges only above the free quotas. Small apps often pay a few dollars; costs grow with document reads and writes, downloads, Functions usage and SMS.

#How much free storage does Firebase give?

1 GiB in Firestore, 1 GB in Realtime Database and 10 GB of Hosting on Spark. File storage in Cloud Storage needs Blaze, which includes 5 GB free.

#How many Firebase projects can I create for free?

Firebase says the quota is usually around 5 to 10 projects, and it may increase with a Cloud Billing account in good standing.

#Can I set a spending limit on Firebase?

Only for some products (Cloud Functions, App Hosting, AI Logic, Extensions). Budget alerts don't cap Firestore or Storage charges.

Compare with a fixed monthly price on the StitchDB pricing page.