Pricing And Experimentation Friction
Sources: 1 • Confidence: Medium • Updated: 2026-04-13 04:02
Key takeaways
- Convex offers a free tier that includes up to 40 deployments and up to six team members.
- Supabase is positioned as Postgres with direct querying and optional SDKs/RLS for client-to-database synchronization via its compute plane, while Convex is a higher-level application-data abstraction where developers do not directly touch SQL.
- Environment variable management is described as a remaining Convex workflow gap, with a desire for code-defined env var declarations that auto-sync like other deployment artifacts.
- Convex pricing includes free monthly quotas such as one million function calls and then charges per additional million calls plus metered compute (GB-hours) and storage overages.
- Convex supports non-deterministic work via actions that can call external services and then invoke mutations to persist results, while queries and mutations are intended to remain pure database operations.
Sections
Pricing And Experimentation Friction
- Convex offers a free tier that includes up to 40 deployments and up to six team members.
- Supabase's free plan limits users to two active projects, requiring pausing or deleting an existing project to test additional ones.
- Supabase billing is organization-based such that upgrading one project to Pro can cause all projects in that organization to become paid instances with a minimum monthly charge per project.
- Convex pricing includes free monthly quotas such as one million function calls and then charges per additional million calls plus metered compute (GB-hours) and storage overages.
Abstraction Layer And Security Surface
- Supabase is positioned as Postgres with direct querying and optional SDKs/RLS for client-to-database synchronization via its compute plane, while Convex is a higher-level application-data abstraction where developers do not directly touch SQL.
- Convex requires developers to expose data through explicit queries and mutations written as code, whereas Supabase often relies on database schema design plus RLS policies to control what clients can access directly.
- In Convex, schema and backend logic live in a dedicated project folder so database state and access patterns are described and versioned in code rather than configured primarily in a dashboard.
- Convex provides strong TypeScript type inference so queries against tables or fields not in the declared schema produce immediate type errors in the editor/LSP.
Workflow Automation And Operability
- Environment variable management is described as a remaining Convex workflow gap, with a desire for code-defined env var declarations that auto-sync like other deployment artifacts.
- Convex logs in the cloud surface backend errors to aid debugging of deployed functions.
- Convex Cloud Code is reported to lack working default LSP support, contributing to type issues that were later fixed by running TypeScript checks and addressing errors.
- Convex automatically redeploys code changes to the dev instance and can block deployment when schema changes conflict with existing data until the conflicting data is resolved.
Compute Runtime And Scaling Model
- Convex pricing includes free monthly quotas such as one million function calls and then charges per additional million calls plus metered compute (GB-hours) and storage overages.
- Convex uses an isolate-based compute layer co-located with the database so requests run near data, enabling faster operations and more usage-proportional scaling than traditional always-on database instances.
- Convex actions can optionally run on Node by declaring a Node runtime directive at the top of the file.
Side Effects Background Work And Integrations
- Convex supports non-deterministic work via actions that can call external services and then invoke mutations to persist results, while queries and mutations are intended to remain pure database operations.
- Convex offers installable backend components (e.g., Stripe integration, agent tooling, crons, and R2/Resend integrations) that can be added without leaving the codebase.
- Convex Work Pools provide concurrency-limited job execution with queuing and features like retries and completion handling.
Watchlist
- Convex file bandwidth pricing is described as relatively high, and the team is building a file-storage-to-CDN component to reduce those costs.
- Environment variable management is described as a remaining Convex workflow gap, with a desire for code-defined env var declarations that auto-sync like other deployment artifacts.
Unknowns
- What are the current, authoritative Supabase free-tier limits and organization/project billing rules, including any minimum monthly charges per project?
- What are the current Convex free-tier quotas and overage rates (function calls, GB-hours, storage, file bandwidth), and how often have they changed?
- How does Convex file bandwidth pricing compare in practice for media-heavy apps, and does the promised CDN-backed file storage component ship with materially different rates?
- Under what workloads and constraints does the isolate-co-located compute model deliver the claimed performance and scaling benefits, and what are the limits (cold starts, CPU ceilings, runtime restrictions)?
- How robust and general is Convex's real-time invalidation model for complex queries, high fan-out updates, and multi-tenant permissioning?