/pricing/ · Intended launch price Planned
A free tier that stays awake, then $19 a month.
Two prices, once the managed service exists: a free tier that never puts your site to sleep, and $19 a month for a backend above it. No bandwidth bill, no charge per domain, and nothing to pay while a project sits idle. None of it is built yet, so these are the intended prices rather than something you can buy today. What you can have today is the source code, free, and that is further down this page.
Plannedthe managed service: intended prices, not built yet Shippingthe open-source core: free, and running today
Cratefield Free Planned
The free tier of the managed service. Not built yet, so this is what it is meant to be, not something you can sign up for today. Your site stays awake even here: a backend nobody is using costs us nothing to leave running.
- A live backend at you.cratefield.app
- The core pieces, plus sign-ups, waitlists, content, notifications, webhooks, telemetry and more
- ~100k requests a month, then it slows down rather than billing you
- 100 MB database, always on, never put to sleep
- Spam protection and rate limiting included
- Email goes out on a shared domain; bring your own key for more
Cratefield Planned
The intended launch price. The service is not built, so this is not yet something you can buy, and it can move before launch.
- No bandwidth bill. Data going out is never charged, at any volume
- As many domains as you like. Not $10 each
- 10 GB of database storage, then $1 per GB a month
- 10M requests a month, then $0.30 per million, at the rate we pay
- A database for every backend, and 50,000 fit under one account
- Never put to sleep, nothing to restore, no cold storage
- Builds, updates, secrets, certificates and logs, all handled
Scale Planned
Past the point where a list price holds up: more databases than a price list can cover, storage well beyond 10 GB, or a contract someone in your company has to read first.
- Storage and request volumes past the list
- Your own cloud account instead of ours
- A written agreement rather than a checkout page
- No number here, because it would be invented
Why $19 and not $25: the three things that cost most on a hosted platform are bandwidth going out, custom domains, and keeping a server warm for a project nobody is using. All three cost us close to nothing here, so none of them is billed. The one thing that can genuinely run away is requests, and those are charged at the rate we pay rather than marked up. The arithmetic is below.
Run it yourself Shipping
The half you can have today.
Everything the managed service would run for you is already written, published and open source. You build it on your own machine and put it wherever you like. Nothing to sign up for, nothing to pay us, and it works whether or not the service above ever exists.
- 65 crates on crates.io, MIT licensed
- Every piece we would run for you: sign-ups, waitlists, content, notifications, webhooks, telemetry and more — the published modules
- Runs on Cloudflare Workers with a D1 database, or as one Linux binary on your own Postgres
- A
Dockerfileand a compose file in the repository, if that is how you deploy fz data exportwrites your data back out in one command- No licence fee, no seat count, no usage meter, ever
- You run it: builds, updates, secrets, domains
- You pay your cloud provider directly, and nothing to us
Sign-in — passkeys, Google, Apple, Facebook, email and password, magic links — is open source on the same terms, in Cratefield/harness with everything else. Our CI builds and tests the core on Linux, so Linux is the machine we can vouch for; it is ordinary Rust with nothing platform-specific in it, but we do not run a build on anything else.
The alternatives
Published list prices, side by side.
Every figure below is the vendor's own, checked September 2026, and linked to the page it came from. They are list prices for comparison, not quotes: real bills depend on usage. Re-check before relying on any of them.
| Line item | Supabase | Railway | Vercel | Firebase | Underneath Cratefield |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Base plan | Free $0. Pro $25/month per organization, including $10 of compute credit. Team $599/month. | Free trial $0. Hobby $5/month. Pro $20/month per seat. The plan fee is a usage credit, not a cap. | Hobby $0, non-commercial only. Pro $20/month per seat. | Spark $0, with hard daily caps. Blaze is pay as you go with no base fee. | $5/month per account for the compute platform. Nothing per project. |
| Compute | An included Micro instance; larger tiers billed per project. | $20 per vCPU-month and $10 per GB RAM-month, billed per second while held. | Serverless and edge functions, metered by CPU and wall time; an included allotment, then usage. | Functions billed per invocation, GB-second and GHz-second. | 10M requests and 30M CPU-ms included, then $0.30 per million requests and $0.02 per million CPU-ms. Idle costs nothing. |
| Database | Postgres included; 8 GB on Pro, then $0.125 per GB. | Postgres runs as a container: you pay its vCPU, RAM and $0.15 per GB-month of volume. | No first-party database; Postgres via the marketplace (Neon), billed on its own plan. | Firestore bills per operation: 50K reads, 20K writes and 20K deletes per day free, then Google Cloud rates. | 25B rows read and 50M rows written per month included, then $0.001 and $1.00 per million. 5 GB storage, then $0.75 per GB-month. |
| Egress | 250 GB included on Pro, then $0.09 per GB. | $0.05 per GB. | Fast Data Transfer: 1 TB included on Pro, then metered per GB. | 10 GiB/month free, then Google Cloud network rates. | No charge for data transfer out. |
| Custom domains | $10 per domain per month, per project, as an add-on. | Included in the plan. | Included. | Included with Hosting. | 100 custom hostnames included, then $0.10 per hostname per month, to a limit of 50,000. |
| A database per tenant | One Postgres project per tenant means one compute instance per tenant, from $10/month each. | One Postgres container per tenant, each billed for the RAM and CPU it holds. | Not a Vercel concept; you bring a database and isolate in the application. | One Firestore database per tenant; operations and storage bill per database. | 50,000 databases per account. Storage bills on the account total, not per database. |
| Idle projects | Free projects are paused after 1 week of inactivity, restorable for 90 days. Paid projects are not paused. | Containers bill for held RAM and CPU whether or not requests arrive. | Serverless functions scale to zero; billed per invocation. | Firestore has no pause; Spark enforces daily caps instead. | No administrative pause and nothing to restore. Compute scales to zero, so an idle backend costs only its storage. |
| What we would charge on top | — | — | — | — | $19 per backend per month, flat. Intended launch price, not yet purchasable. |
supabase.com/
Firebase's paid per-operation rates are set by Google Cloud rather than published on the Firebase pricing page, so the free allowances are quoted here and the rates are linked rather than reproduced.
Cost structure
Where the money actually goes.
Cratefield charges nothing yet, and its price is an intended launch price rather than a tier you can buy, so there is no tier list to compare. What can be compared is the shape of the cost underneath, because that is what the price has to sit on. Four differences are structural rather than promotional.
- Bandwidth out is not a line item. Data going out is not billed, so an app that serves images or big responses does not turn into a bandwidth bill. Supabase Pro includes 250 GB and then charges $0.09 per GB; Railway charges $0.05 per GB from the first byte.
- Nothing is kept warm per project. Supabase Pro starts at $25 a month per organization and keeps a Postgres server running, so a database per customer means a server per customer. Railway bills the RAM and CPU you hold whether or not anyone visits. Here a backend nobody is using costs only its storage.
- A custom domain costs cents, not dollars. 100 custom hostnames are included, then $0.10 per hostname per month. The equivalent Supabase add-on is $10 per domain per month, per project. For a product that gives every customer their own subdomain, that is the difference between a rounding error and a line item.
- Keeping customers apart is not an upsell. Giving each one its own database is the default here, and 50,000 of them fit under one account. Everywhere else in this table, you buy that separation one server or one container at a time.
This is why a flat $19 works where a hosted platform needs $25 plus metered extras: the inputs that would force metering are the ones that cost us nothing. It is an intended price on an unbuilt service, not a contract.
What you would be paying for
The work, not the licence.
The code is MIT and always will be. A fee, when there is one, buys the running of it: the parts of owning a backend that nobody looks forward to. All of it is Planned. What the service would cover.
- Assembling your backend from the pieces you picked
- Deploying every change, and compiling only when the module set is new, with a build log you can read
- Creating the database and applying its updates, in order
- Holding secrets, rotating signing keys, keeping both out of the logs
- Attaching your domain and renewing its certificate
- Forwarding the request logs back to you
- Rolling forward when a piece of it ships a new version
If you would rather do all of that yourself, the tool that does it is in the repository and costs nothing. That is the point of the licence.
The price can still move before launch. If it does, the people on the early-access list hear it first, and they hear it once.