# A Firebase alternative when you want SQL and one flat price

Firebase is a set of products for building apps quickly, with a client SDK, a document database, sign-in, hosting, functions and analytics. It is generous at the start and well integrated.

Lathe is a different shape. You get a machine of your own that runs your app, Postgres and sign-in, with the users stored in your own database. It is a better match when your data is relational and you would rather read a plain monthly price than usage meters. It is a worse match when your app depends on Firebase's client-side products.

Prices and limits below were checked against Firebase's official pricing page on October 4, 2026.

## How Firebase bills

Firebase has a no-cost Spark plan and a pay-as-you-go Blaze plan. The pricing page lists, on the no-cost tier:

- Authentication up to 50,000 monthly active users with Identity Platform, with SAML and OIDC limited to 50.
- Firestore with 1 GiB of stored data, 50,000 reads a day, 20,000 writes a day and 20,000 deletes a day.
- Phone sign-in billed per SMS sent.

Past the no-cost quotas, Firestore and many other products move to Google Cloud pricing, and some are billed per operation or per request. That model is cheap while you are small and tied to how much your app is used. The bill follows reads, writes, bandwidth and storage rather than a machine size.

## Lathe's model

Lathe plans are $15, $29, $49 and $89 a month. The price is for one machine. Apps, Postgres, Auth, Redis, CouchDB and NATS can share it, with storage, backups and 20 TB of outbound traffic included. Reads, writes, auth users and requests are not separate lines.

Lathe also has a Free plan with a 0.5 vCPU machine, 1 GB of RAM and 10 GB of disk, 200 awake hours a month, sleeping when idle, no daily backups and one per person. Paid plans are always on.

| Question | Firebase | Lathe |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Data model | Document database (Firestore) | Postgres, plus CouchDB if you want documents |
| Billing | No-cost quotas, then usage-based | One fixed price per machine |
| Sign-in | Firebase Authentication | Auth with users in your own Postgres |
| Client library | Firebase SDKs | supabase-js and the usual Postgres drivers |
| Scaling | Managed by Google Cloud | Upsize one machine; no horizontal scaling |
| Extras such as push, crash reports, analytics | Included products | Not included |

## What Firebase gives you that Lathe does not

Firebase includes products Lathe does not offer: push messaging, crash reporting, app analytics, A/B testing and device test labs. It also scales without you choosing a machine size. If your mobile app leans on those pieces, keep them, and consider using Postgres for the data only.

Moving also costs work. Firestore's SDK and query model do not carry over, so the data layer and the sign-in calls need to be rewritten. This is a migration, not a switch. Check your sign-in methods first, including phone sign-in, against what Lathe's sign-in page lists.

## What Lathe changes

Postgres is a standard database with SQL, joins, constraints and extensions such as pgvector. Every ORM and client that talks to Postgres works with it. Sign-in is built on the open-source Supabase Auth server, so supabase-js sign-in calls keep working, and the users sit in the auth schema of your Postgres and appear in every backup.

The limits are stated up front: one machine, no high availability, no automatic failover, no horizontal scaling and no point-in-time recovery. Paid plans take a daily backup and keep seven. Support comes from two founders by email, answered within a business day.

## Which one fits

Choose Firebase when your app is mostly a mobile client that benefits from its SDKs, realtime listeners and the extra products around them, and the usage-based bill suits you.

Consider Lathe when your data is relational, you want SQL and your own database credentials, and you would rather choose a machine size than predict reads and writes.

## Try it on a small project

Start with a new feature or a staging copy and keep Firebase running while you compare. Count your own monthly reads, writes, active users and storage, then compare the total with a Lathe plan.

Lathe offers a Free plan at $0 when the current plan list includes it, and paid plans start at $15 a month. Free has no daily backups, so keep real data on a paid plan.