/pricing/ · Intended launch price Planned
$19 a month, and here is the arithmetic.
One flat fee per backend. Unlimited egress, unlimited custom domains, and no instance kept warm for a project nobody is using. The service is not built yet, so this is an intended price rather than something you can buy today, and the page shows the list prices it is measured against as well as the cost that sits underneath it.
Shippingrun it yourself today Plannedintended launch price, not yet purchasable
Harness Shipping
Run it yourself with the fz CLI. This is the free tier, and it is the source code.
- Ten crates, MIT licensed
- Every module, including the ones we would run for you
- The conformance kit and the CLI
- No licence fee, no seat count, no usage meter
- You operate it: builds, migrations, secrets, domains
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.
- Unlimited egress. Never billed, at any volume
- Unlimited custom domains. Not $10 each
- 10 GB database storage, then $1 per GB-month
- 10M requests a month, then $0.30 per million, passed through at cost
- A database per tenant, and no cap on how many
- No pausing, no restore window, no cold storage
- Builds, migrations, secrets, certificates and log forwarding
Scale Planned
Past the point where a list price is honest: thousands of tenant databases, storage well beyond 10 GB, or terms your procurement team needs to read.
- Volume storage and request rates
- Your infrastructure 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, which are egress, custom domains and keeping an instance warm for an idle project, cost us close to nothing here, so they are not billed. The one input that can genuinely run away is requests, and that is metered at the rate we pay rather than marked up. The arithmetic is below.
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 | 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. | 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. | 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. | 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. | 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 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. | 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. | 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 has no price, so there is no tier to compare. What can be compared is the shape of the cost underneath, because that is what any future price has to sit on. Four differences are structural rather than promotional.
- Egress is not a line item. Data transfer out is not billed, so a media-heavy or large-response API 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.
- There is no per-project compute floor. Supabase Pro starts at $25 per month per organization and keeps a Postgres instance warm, so a database per tenant means an instance per tenant. Railway bills held RAM and CPU whether or not traffic arrives. Here an idle backend 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.
- Per-tenant isolation is not priced as a premium. Giving each tenant its own database is the default here, and 50,000 of them fit under one account. Everywhere else in this table, isolation is bought one instance 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 operating: the parts of running a backend that are nobody's favourite afternoon. All of it is Planned.
- Generating the Cargo manifest and the composition file from the modules you pick
- Building Rust to wasm on every change, with a build log you can read
- Creating the database and applying forward-only migrations, in order
- Holding secrets, rotating signing keys, and keeping them out of the logs
- Attaching your domain and renewing its certificate
- Forwarding request spans and logs back to you
- Rolling forward when a module ships a new contract version
If you would rather do all of that yourself, the CLI 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.