Firebase
Firebase is Google's mobile/web backend-as-a-service, acquired by Google in 2014. Core products: Firestore (NoSQL document DB, now offered in Standard and Enterprise editions — Enterprise edition with MongoDB-compatible queries went GA in August 2025; full-text search followed via Pipeline operations, GA April 2026), Realtime Database, Authentication, Cloud Functions, Hosting. Proprietary SaaS, no self-host option. Free Spark tier: 50K Firestore reads/day, 20K writes/day, 1GiB storage. Blaze (paid) is usage-based: $0.06/100K reads, $0.18/100K writes, $0.02/100K deletes, $0.18/GB stored, plus $0.40/million Cloud Function invocations after 2M free/month. Google's own billing example: a 5,000 DAU app runs ~$12.14/month, scaling to 100,000 DAU costs ~$292/month. Per Statista/AppBrain data (March 2026), Firebase is the most-used mobile analytics SDK on Android, with 99.55% integration reach among apps that use an analytics SDK. Current version/status: Firestore Enterprise edition + MongoDB compatibility GA'd August 2025; full-text search via Pipeline operations GA'd April 2026; platform is continuously-updated SaaS, not discretely versioned. License: proprietary SaaS (Google). Pricing: Free Spark tier: 50K Firestore reads/day, 20K writes/day, 1GiB storage; Blaze pay-as-you-go charges $0.06/100K reads, $0.18/100K writes, $0.02/100K deletes, $0.18/GB stored, and $0.40/million Cloud Fu
Pick Firebase when you're shipping a mobile-first app fast and want Auth + Firestore + push notifications + Crashlytics under one Google-run roof — the free Spark tier and 2M free Cloud Function invocations make prototyping painless. Don't pick it for a relational data model or cost predictability: there's no hard spending cap, so a runaway query or looping function can turn a $12/month bill into thousands overnight — a risk practitioners flag constantly. If you need Postgres semantics and a flat, budgetable bill, take Supabase's $25/month Pro plan instead. Honest weakness: usage-based pricing with no ceiling is a foot-gun Google hasn't fully solved — you have to build your own budget alerts to avoid getting burned. Known weakness: No hard spending cap on the Blaze plan — a runaway query or looping Cloud Function can spike a normally ~$12/month bill into the thousands overnight, a risk widely flagged by practitioners that Firebase's own budget alerts don't fully prevent.