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Database Hosting

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James Brucker edited this page Jul 17, 2025 · 3 revisions

The application will use a relational database. The project wants to use a cloud-hosted database with

  • generous free tier
  • low-cost paid tier in case usage exceeds the free tier

Features to pay attention to

  • kind of database used (Postgres, SQLite, NoSql datastores)
  • storage quota
  • cost to export data, aka network egress costs
  • daily usage limits

To discover and compare databases I searched the web and asked questions to both ChatGPT and Deepseek. Deepseek gave more detailed answers and even provided benchmark results, which it claims to have run itself!

Cloud Database Alternatives

  • Supabase free tier

    • 500 MB Postgres DB
    • 1 GB file store
    • Unlimited API calls and users
    • built-in auth and log tables (blog.logrocket.com)
    • integrations with other services

  • Neon Free Tier

    • 0.5 GB storage, Postgres DB
    • 190 compute hours/mo, 5 GB/mo egress
    • Paid tier: $19/month, 100 projects, 10 GB storage, 300 compute hours/mo

  • Firebase Firestore Spark Plan free & paid tier

    • NoSQL document DB
    • 1 GB stored data, 10 GB egress/month
    • Daily free quota: 50K document reads, 20K writes, 20K deletes
    • 50K monthly active users
    • "other authentication"
    • Firebase is a complete platform for app hosting, mobile development, database, and more.

  • Cloudflare D1

    • Serverless SQLite-compatible SQL DB
    • 5 GB storage/month
    • Daily free quota: 5M row reads, 100K row writes
    • No egress fees
    • Description in logrocket blog
    • Cloudflare's Other Databases: Cloudflare KV, Cloudflare R2 for S3-compatible object stores, Durable Objects
    • According to benchmarks, Cloudflare D1 has quick startup and low latency, but also slower than Supabase, esp. for concurrent requests
    • Cloudflare also provides web hosting. For the back-end, consider Cloudflare Workers which have a generous free tier. Cloudflare provides free storage and unlimited access for static pages.

  • CockroachDB free tier.

    • 10 GB storage
    • 50 M requests/mo
    • Available on GCP and AWS
    • daily and hourly backups
    • Drawbacks: not fully Postgres compatible, high latency, high resource usage.

  • Tembo open-source serverless platform for Postgres. Free tier includes:

    • unlimited databases
    • 5 GB stores
    • 0.25 vCPU and 1 GB memory
    • unlimited reads and writes
    • 30-day log retention

  • Convex described as similar to Supabase. Free tier features:

    • 2 developers
    • 5 projects
    • 1 M function calls
    • 20 GB-hours action-compute
    • 0.5 GB database storage

  • AstroDB works only with web sites built with Astro.

11 Alternatives to Planetscale blog on logrocket.com describes free cloud database services.

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