Best Free Databases in 2026 (Limits Compared, Honestly)

"Free database" used to be an easy search. You'd pick whichever provider had the most generous free tier, spin up a project, and forget about it. That world has changed. Over the last two years, several popular free tiers were cut back or removed entirely, some now pause your database when it's idle, and at least one popular free option now deletes your database after 30 days.

So the question isn't really "which database is free?" Most of them are, in some form. The useful question is: which free tier fits the project you're actually building, and what happens when you hit its limits?

This guide compares the free databases worth considering in 2026, with the real limits from each provider's pricing page, the catch in each one, and who each one suits. At MyKavo we run our own product on Supabase, so I'll be upfront about that bias, and equally upfront about where other options are the better choice.

What "free" actually means for a database#

Before the list, it's worth knowing the four ways a free database tier can bite you, because they matter more than the headline storage number.

Storage caps. Free tiers range from 500 MB to 5 GB. For a side project, 500 MB is more than it sounds. For anything storing images, logs, or analytics events, it fills up fast.

Usage caps. Some tiers limit reads and writes per day or month, or compute hours. You can have plenty of storage left and still get throttled.

Pausing and cold starts. Some free databases pause after inactivity, or scale to zero and take a moment to wake up. Great for cost, less great for a demo you send to someone who opens it a week later.

Expiry and missing backups. A few free tiers delete data after a set time, and most don't include backups. Free usually means you're responsible for your own safety net.

The quick comparison#

Database	Type	Free storage	The main catch
Supabase	Postgres + auth, storage, APIs	500 MB per project, 2 active projects	Pauses after a week of inactivity, no backups on free
Neon	Serverless Postgres	0.5 GB per project, up to 100 projects	100 compute-hours per project, scales to zero after 5 minutes
Firebase (Firestore)	NoSQL document database	1 GiB	50K reads and 20K writes per day, no Cloud Functions or Storage on free
MongoDB Atlas	NoSQL document database	512 MB	Shared resources, up to 100 ops/sec, no backups
Turso	SQLite (libSQL)	5 GB	500M rows read, 10M rows written per month
Cloudflare D1	SQLite at the edge	5 GB	5M rows read, 100K rows written per day
PlanetScale	Postgres / MySQL (Vitess)	No free plan	Cheapest plan starts at $5/month
Render Postgres	Postgres	1 GB	Free databases expire 30 days after creation

Now the detail on each.

1. Supabase: best all-in-one free backend#

Supabase gives you a full Postgres database plus authentication, file storage, auto-generated APIs, realtime subscriptions, and edge functions in one project. For most web apps, that's the entire backend.

Free tier (checked September 2026): 500 MB database per project, 1 GB file storage, 5 GB egress, 50,000 monthly active users for auth, 500,000 edge function invocations, 200 realtime connections, and up to 2 active projects.

The catch: free projects pause after a week of low activity. Your data stays and you can resume it from the dashboard, but a paused project means your app stops working until someone does. Free projects also don't get automatic backups, and logs are kept for only one day. The Pro plan starts at $25 a month and removes pausing, adds daily backups, and raises limits.

Best for: SaaS apps, dashboards, and side projects that need auth and storage alongside the database, and anyone who wants real Postgres rather than a proprietary data model.

We cover the free tier in detail, including how to handle pausing, in our guide to Supabase free tier limits.

2. Neon: best free serverless Postgres#

Neon is pure Postgres, built to scale compute up and down automatically, with a standout feature called branching: you can create an instant copy of your database for testing a change, the way you'd branch code in Git.

Free tier: 0.5 GB storage per project, 100 compute-hours per project each month, up to 100 projects, 10 branches per project, and autoscaling up to 2 compute units. Compute scales to zero after 5 minutes of inactivity, and that can't be turned off on the free plan.

The catch: scale-to-zero means the first query after an idle period takes a moment longer while compute wakes up. Storage is small. And unlike Supabase, it's just the database: auth, storage, and APIs are up to you.

Best for: developers who want plain Postgres with their own backend or ORM, lots of small projects, and teams who'll use branching for previews and testing.

3. Firebase (Cloud Firestore): best for mobile and realtime NoSQL#

Firebase is Google's app platform, and Firestore is its NoSQL document database. It's especially popular for mobile apps thanks to excellent SDKs, offline support, and realtime sync.

Free (Spark) tier: 1 GiB stored data, 50,000 document reads, 20,000 writes, and 20,000 deletes per day, plus 50,000 monthly active users for Authentication and 10 GB of Hosting storage.

The catch: limits are per day, and they're counted in document operations, which surprises people. A single page that lists 100 items costs 100 reads every time it loads. Cloud Functions and Cloud Storage are not available on the free Spark plan at all. And Firestore's document model is a different way of thinking than SQL, which makes complex queries and reporting harder.

Best for: mobile apps, realtime features like chat, and teams already in the Google ecosystem.

4. MongoDB Atlas: best free document database for flexible data#

MongoDB Atlas is the managed version of MongoDB, and it's been a developer favorite for flexible, JSON-like data for years.

Free (M0) tier: 512 MB storage on shared infrastructure, up to 100 operations per second.

The catch: 512 MB with shared RAM and CPU is fine for learning and prototypes but tight for anything real. No backups on the free tier. The next step up, a Flex cluster, costs up to $30 a month.

Best for: learning MongoDB, prototypes, and apps whose data really is document-shaped.

5. Turso: best free SQLite for many small databases#

Turso runs libSQL, a fork of SQLite, as a hosted service. Its big idea is lots of small databases, even one per user or per tenant, placed close to where they're used.

Free tier: up to 100 databases, 5 GB total storage, 500 million rows read and 10 million rows written per month. The paid Developer plan is $4.99 a month.

The catch: SQLite is simpler than Postgres, with fewer advanced features, and the per-tenant database model is a different architecture than most tutorials assume.

Best for: multi-tenant apps, apps that want very fast local-style reads, and developers who like SQLite's simplicity.

6. Cloudflare D1: best free database if you're on Cloudflare#

D1 is Cloudflare's serverless SQLite database, designed to work with Cloudflare Workers.

Free tier: 5 GB total storage, 5 million rows read and 100,000 rows written per day. On paid Workers plans, you pay for rows read and written beyond generous included amounts rather than for compute time.

The catch: it's built around the Cloudflare Workers ecosystem, so it's most natural if your app already runs there. Write limits on the free tier are the ones to watch.

Best for: apps built on Cloudflare Workers or Pages that want a database without leaving the platform.

7. PlanetScale: no longer free#

PlanetScale was once the go-to free MySQL option. It removed its free plan in 2024, and today its cheapest option is single-node Postgres starting at $5 a month. It's still a strong platform, especially for scaling MySQL with Vitess, but it no longer belongs on a list of free databases. If you're following an older tutorial that uses PlanetScale's free tier, you'll need a different choice or a paid plan.

8. Render Postgres: free, but temporary#

Render offers a free Postgres database with 1 GB of storage. But the key detail is in their documentation: free Render Postgres databases expire 30 days after creation, with a 14-day grace period before deletion, and you can only have one per workspace.

Best for: short experiments and tutorials. Not for anything you want to keep.

How to choose the right free database#

You want the fastest path to a full app with login. Supabase. Auth, database, storage, and APIs in one place saves weeks.

You want plain Postgres with your own backend. Neon, especially if you'll use branching. Supabase also works well here.

You're building a mobile app with realtime sync. Firebase.

Your data is naturally document-shaped and you know MongoDB. MongoDB Atlas.

You're building a multi-tenant app or love SQLite. Turso.

Your app already runs on Cloudflare Workers. D1.

You just need something for a weekend tutorial. Almost anything, but avoid building anything important on a database that expires.

What happens when your free database becomes a real app#

Here's what most "best free database" lists skip. The free tier decision is easy. The part that catches people is what comes after launch, when the app has real users.

Pausing and limits become outages. A paused Supabase project, a Firestore daily limit hit at 6pm, a Neon compute budget used up: to your users, each one looks the same. The app loads, but data doesn't appear, logins fail, or pages show errors.

Backups become your job. Most free tiers don't include them. Set up your own exports early, before you need them. Our guide to backing up Supabase for free walks through doing this with the Supabase CLI.

Changes happen without anyone noticing. When your content lives in a database, a bad write, a migration, or an admin edit can change what your live pages show, and nobody reviews it the way they'd review a code change.

You need to know about problems before users do. Database dashboards show database metrics. They don't show you that your pricing page is now blank because a query started returning nothing.

This is where monitoring comes in, and it's worth setting up while you're still on the free tier, because that's when pausing and limits are most likely to cause surprises.

Four free-database mistakes to avoid#

Picking on storage alone. A 5 GB tier with tight daily write limits can serve you worse than a 500 MB tier with generous usage. Look at the limit your app will actually hit first. For most apps, that's reads, writes, or compute, not storage.

Following an outdated tutorial. A lot of tutorials still assume PlanetScale's free tier or older Firebase limits. Check the provider's current pricing page before you build around a limit that no longer exists.

Putting secrets in the frontend. Every provider here has keys that are safe to expose and keys that aren't. Mixing them up is the most common way free-tier apps get their data exposed.

Having no exit plan. Choose a database you could move away from if you needed to. Standard Postgres (Supabase, Neon) and SQLite (Turso, D1) are easier to migrate than proprietary models, because the tooling and export formats are widely supported.

Where MyKavo fits in#

MyKavo is our product, so here's the honest version. MyKavo doesn't host databases and doesn't connect to yours. It watches the public pages of your app, the homepage, pricing, sign-up and login pages, key content pages, and tells you when something important changes or breaks: an error status, missing content, a changed title or meta tag, a removed script, or a sign-up form that disappeared. Each alert shows the before and after, ranked by severity.

If you use Supabase, MyKavo has a native integration: a Database Webhook or a pg_net trigger can start a MyKavo check whenever your data changes, for example when a post is published, so you see what that change did to your live pages within minutes. MyKavo never accesses your database. It only receives the webhook call. (Triggered checks are part of the Pro and Agency plans. The free plan monitors one site and five pages on a weekly scan.)

What it won't do: MyKavo doesn't monitor database performance, query speed, or storage usage. For those, use your database provider's own dashboard and alerts.

The bottom line#

Every major provider still offers some kind of free database in 2026, but the details matter far more than they used to. Pick based on what you're building: Supabase for a full backend, Neon for pure Postgres, Firebase for mobile, Turso or D1 for SQLite. Then plan for the realities of free tiers from day one: pausing, limits, and backups you'll need to handle yourself.

And once your app is live, make sure you hear about problems before your users do. MyKavo watches your app's key pages and alerts you, with evidence, when something breaks or changes, and connects directly to Supabase so data changes can trigger a check. Start free.