PocketBaseOne Go binary: SQLite database, auth, file storage, realtime and an admin UI.100.0Pricing
- Pricing model
- free (self-host only)
- Entry price (/mo)
- $0/mo
- Egress metered
- No
Convex vs alternatives: reactive backend platforms compared Pricing Compared
- Every vendor says your data is yours; that is true and not the question - Data extraction is a weekend for nine of these eleven - Rewriting the two thousand call sites that read that data is not
- Providers
- 11
- Fields compared
- 3
- Source confidence
- 42%
- Last verified
- 2026-07-20 (2mo ago)
- Re-verified
- every 30 days
11 tools · verified 2mo ago
PocketBaseOne Go binary: SQLite database, auth, file storage, realtime and an admin UI.100.0
ZeroSync engine that puts a queryable client cache in front of your own Postgres.100.0Pricing
- Pricing model
- free (self-host)
- Entry price (/mo)
- $0/mo
- Egress metered
- No
FirebaseGoogle's app platform: Firestore documents, auth, functions, deep mobile SDKs.62.5Pricing
- Pricing model
- usage only (Blaze pay-as-you-go)
- Entry price (/mo)
- $0/mo
- Egress metered
- Yes
ElectricSQLPostgres read-path sync: stream subsets of your own database to clients over HTTP.45.3Pricing
- Pricing model
- free (self-host) + optional cloud
- Entry price (/mo)
- –
- Egress metered
- Partial
Pricing
- Pricing model
- –
- Entry price (/mo)
- –
- Egress metered
- Unknown
Neon + DrizzleThe DIY baseline: serverless Postgres, a typed SQL query builder, nothing else.37.9Pricing
- Pricing model
- flat + compute-hours + storage
- Entry price (/mo)
- $19/mo
- Egress metered
- Partial
AppwriteOpen-source backend platform: databases, auth, storage, functions, self-hostable.31.3Pricing
- Pricing model
- per-seat + usage
- Entry price (/mo)
- $15/mo
- Egress metered
- Yes
InstantDBClient-side reactive database with a relational graph model and instant sync.11.7Pricing
- Pricing model
- flat + usage
- Entry price (/mo)
- $30/mo
- Egress metered
- Unknown
ConvexReactive TypeScript backend: database, functions and live queries in one project.10.4Pricing
- Pricing model
- per-seat + usage
- Entry price (/mo)
- $25/mo
- Egress metered
- Yes
NhostPostgres plus Hasura GraphQL, auth, storage and serverless functions.10.4Pricing
- Pricing model
- flat per project + usage
- Entry price (/mo)
- $25/mo
- Egress metered
- Yes
SupabaseManaged Postgres with auth, storage, realtime and edge functions around it.10.4Pricing
- Pricing model
- flat per org + compute + usage
- Entry price (/mo)
- $25/mo
- Egress metered
- Yes
yespartialnounknown
Sources shown beside each value · Learn how sourcing works
measured vendor-claimed community inferredExpand any row for the source, verification date, and caveat behind every cell.
Is the cheapest option the right one?
Price is one group of 3 fields out of 26. Everything else, features, limits, portability, how well any of it works for agents, is on the full convex vs alternatives: reactive backend platforms compared comparison.
What exit cost actually measures
- Every vendor says your data is yours; that is true and not the question
- Data extraction is a weekend for nine of these eleven
- Rewriting the two thousand call sites that read that data is not
- The ladder is about code, not bytes
- Rung 1: standard SQL over the wire, leaving is a connection string
- Rung 2: standard engine behind a vendor SDK, schema and queries port but auth, storage and realtime call sites get rewritten
- Rung 3: proprietary API over an open self-hostable engine, data leaves cleanly but every read and write is vendor-shaped
- Rung 4: adds a proprietary function runtime, so queries, mutations, subscriptions and the render model all go
- Rung 5: rung 4 with no self-host and no self-serve export, making even the data a project
- Open source does not lower the score by itself
- Appwrite, PocketBase and Convex are all open source and all sit at 3 or 4
- The licence governs who may run the server, not who rewrites the client
- Sync engines score unusually well for their age, sitting beside a Postgres
you already control
Where the pricing hides
- Sticker prices cluster between $15 and $30 a month and tell you almost nothing
- Three mechanics decide the real bill
- Per-seat pricing: Convex and Appwrite charge per member on top of usage
- A five-person team starts at five times the headline before a function runs
- Supabase charges per organisation; Firebase charges nothing up front
- On small teams this is usually the largest line and does not shrink when you optimise
Realistic migration paths
- Convex to Postgres is the hard one, plan it before you need it
npx convex exportgives a zip of JSONL per table that loads into Postgres cleanly enough- The work is in the application
- Put a repository layer between your components and Convex early, so reactive queries become one seam not hundreds
- Do it while the app is small; retrofitting later is most of the migration cost
- Firebase to anything starts with the export format, the one genuinely closed artefact here
- The managed Firestore export writes a format only Firestore imports
- In practice you paginate collections through the Admin SDK and write your own JSON
- Fine at gigabytes, painful at terabytes
- Budget separately for translating security rules into row-level security or middleware
- Supabase to plain Postgres is the easy case and the reference point
- pg_dump, restore anywhere, replace supabase-js with your query builder, replace GoTrue with an auth provider
- Weeks, not quarters, and that gap is the entire content of the exit-cost column
- Adding a sync engine later is the underrated option
- Electric and Zero sit beside Postgres rather than replacing it
- "Start on Neon and Drizzle, add Zero when the UI needs to feel instant" is a real sequence, not a rewrite
- None of the all-in-one platforms support that shape
How is this pricing data collected?
- Every cell written from vendor docs, pricing pages and hands-on SDK knowledge, then tagged with provenance
- vendor-claimed cells come off a specific docs or pricing URL, dated to when last plausibly true
- inferred cells are judgement calls or values reasoned from adjacent facts
- Where a fact is genuinely unpublished, the cell is null and renders as an em dash rather than a guess
- Prices are the lowest paid tier, monthly, in USD, excluding usage
- Exit cost is the field this page exists for
- A 1-5 judgement score, lower is better
- Measures one thing: how much application code you rewrite to leave, assuming data is already extracted
- Deliberately ignores how good, how cheap, or how likely to survive the platform is
- A high score is not a verdict against a tool, it is the size of the bet you are placing
- The five rungs are defined in the column tooltip; each score's reasoning sits in that tool's cell note
Pricing questions
Is Convex a good idea if I might need to leave later?
- Only if you price the exit now
- No SQL surface, so every query, mutation and subscription is rewritten on the way out
- The reactive render model has no drop-in equivalent
- Scores 4 of 5 on our exit-cost ladder
- If the codebase may outlive the decision and you are unsure, start on Postgres
Does self-hosting Convex remove the lock-in?
- No, it removes vendor risk, a different problem
- convex-backend is open under FSL-1.1-Apache-2.0 with documented self-hosting, so Convex disappearing cannot strand you
- But self-hosted Convex still speaks the Convex query API
- The cost of moving to something that is not Convex is unchanged
- Exit cost and vendor risk are separate columns for a reason
How should a small team weight exit cost against speed?
- By expected lifespan
- Under twelve months and pre-product-market-fit, exit cost is nearly free and speed is everything: take Convex or Instant
- Past that, rewriting a data layer costs engineer-months and the Postgres options claw it back
- Convex charges its fee at the end, in one payment, and you cannot pay it early
Every tool compared on this page
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