skena vs vercel + supabase
Skena vs Vercel + Supabase
Vercel + Supabase is a great modern stack, but Vercel's usage pricing has no hard spend cap by default, a traffic spike bills uncapped beyond the included tier, and Supabase Pro caps realtime at 500 concurrent connections unless you turn the cap off. Skena runs your React app and its own backend on one flat plan; Skena Dedicated is load-tested at 15,000 live connections.
how far does it scale?
Drag it until Skena runs out.
Watch every managed cloud's bill climb red and drop off while Skena stays flat, across the whole range almost every app lives in. Only the last stop, where you've accidentally built the next TikTok, is where a tangled multi-cluster cloud is finally the right tool.
peak traffic as a 5× spike over a round-the-clock average
Think: A booking system for all of Sweden's hair salons
Skena
$149/moSkena Dedicated, your own box, load-tested to 15k live connections
Supabase
$676/moPro: realtime-connection overage + a compute add-on
Firebase
$823/moper-read bill climbing, no spend cap
Vercel + DB
$2.0k/mobandwidth + edge + invocations, all uncapped
AWS / Kubernetes
$900/mobigger nodes + RDS + ElastiCache + an ops engineer
bars are log-scaled
All of Sweden's salons booking online runs on one Skena Dedicated app. The usage-billed clouds are already into the hundreds-to-thousands a month. ~99% of apps never pass this point.
| Scale | Skena | Supabase | Firebase | Vercel + DB | AWS / Kubernetes | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ~2,000 live connectionsA booking app for every salon in your city | Skena Sharedfrom $5/mo | $117/moPro + compute, already past the 200 free realtime cap | $165/moBlaze, billed per read, past the Spark free caps | $255/moPro, bandwidth + per-invocation billed from unit one | $300/mothe cluster floor, overkill for traffic this size | Even a city-wide booking app is already past every free tier, but it's lunch money on Skena while the managed clouds start metering. A managed cluster is hundreds a month for traffic this size. |
| ~10,000 live connectionsA booking system for all of Sweden's hair salons | Skena Dedicated$149/mo | $676/moPro: realtime-connection overage + a compute add-on | $823/moper-read bill climbing, no spend cap | $2.0k/mobandwidth + edge + invocations, all uncapped | $900/mobigger nodes + RDS + ElastiCache + an ops engineer | All of Sweden's salons booking online runs on one Skena Dedicated app. The usage-billed clouds are already into the hundreds-to-thousands a month. ~99% of apps never pass this point. |
| ~50,000 live connectionsA country's event-ticketing site on sale day | Skena Dedicated, bigger$299/mo | $3.1k/mocompute add-on + realtime overage climbing | $4.1k/moreads + egress dominate the bill | $10k/mouncapped usage, bandwidth + invocations | $2.5k/moscaling the cluster + read replicas | Still one Skena app. Per-operation and bandwidth bills are now firmly in the red; a managed cluster needs an ops team. (Skena's 50k is shown-math on a named box.) |
| ~100,000 live connectionsA nationwide marketplace at Black Friday peak | Skena Dedicated, max$599/mo | $6.2k/mobig compute add-on + realtime overage | $8.2k/moper-operation bill, no spend cap | $21k/mobandwidth + invocations explode | $5.0k/momulti-node + replicas + a DevOps team | A single Skena tier vs four-figure-plus bills everywhere, and you still operate nothing. |
| ~500,000 live read connections, or sustained heavy writesRide-hailing across a whole country, a national Uber | Skena Postgresfrom $2,499/mo | $33k/mo16XL compute + ~$5k realtime overage (Enterprise) | $41k/moper-op bill; RTDB hard-caps at 200k connections | $106k/mouncapped, bandwidth alone is huge | $18k/moa big fleet + egress + a platform team | Reads scale to ~500k on one Skena tier (shown-math); when sustained writes are the wall, Skena's own Postgres takes over through the data-client seam. The usage clouds are now five figures a month. |
| multi-region active-active, true multi-clusterUber, Instagram, or TikTok, global, multi-region | Now the big cloud is the right tool, | , (their enterprise tier too) | , (their enterprise tier too) | , (their enterprise tier too) | This is what it's formulti-region, autoscaling fleets, finally appropriate | You've accidentally built the next Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok. NOW a tangled multi-cluster cloud is the right tool, and almost no app ever gets here. |
Competitor costs are MODELED monthly estimates for an interactive app (assumptions in scaling-model.ts: ~0.1 requests/sec per active user, ~10 KB responses, 10:1 read:write). The usage switch sets the duty cycle: "typical bursts" treats the peak as a 5× spike over a round-the-clock average (conservative); "24/7 sustained" bills every user as active around the clock (full peak). Unit prices verified 2026-06-17 (Vercel, Supabase, Firebase, AWS). Supabase compute figures are net of its $10 monthly credit (gross is $15/$110/$210/$410/$3,730 for Small→16XL), plus $10 per 1,000 peak realtime connections over 500. Skena prices are provisional. Connection figures above 15,000 are shown-math until verified per box; 500k+ is Enterprise territory for the managed clouds.
side by side
Skena vs Vercel + Supabase
| Skena | Vercel + Supabase | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost predictability | No request fee; explicit $0.05/GB after a large included origin pool | Usage-based across bandwidth, functions, and products; no hard spend cap by default (opt-in, lags minutes) |
| Realtime connections | 15,000 on Dedicated (Skena load-tested) | Supabase Pro caps realtime at 500 (10k only with the cap off / Team) |
| Backend power | PocketBase (SQLite), simple, fast, read-heavy | Postgres, more powerful (relations, RLS, pgvector, SQL) |
| What you own | Editor + app + backend bundled; code on disk | You own the code; you assemble + operate two services |
| Graduation path | data-client seam → Postgres when writes demand it | Already on Postgres |
| Best for | Steady, read-heavy apps that want one flat bill | Apps that need Postgres specifically, or genuinely spiky traffic |
what it costs
The bill, itemized.
Skena is one flat, lean box. The other side's bill climbs with seats, sites, or usage.
Skena Cloud, one plan
- Your app + its own backendSkena Shared (Launch $5/mo / Grow $20/mo), scales up to Dedicated, same app
- $5/mo
- Per-seat / per-sitenot billed per seat or per site
- ,
- Origin traffic overageafter 100 GB Launch / 400 GB Grow; cached traffic is free
- $0.05/GB
Vercel Pro + Supabase Pro
- Vercel Pro+ uncapped overage beyond 1 TB / 10M edge requests
- $20/user/mo
- Supabase Pro500 realtime cap unless cap off; then usage overage
- $25/mo
Pricing verified 2026-06-17. Figures drift, see vercel.com/pricing + supabase.com/pricing. Estimates, not quotes.
× When Vercel + Supabase is the better choice
If you need Postgres specifically, relations, row-level security, pgvector, raw SQL, Supabase's mature Postgres and ecosystem beat PocketBase, and Vercel's edge network is excellent for genuinely spiky, global, serverless-shaped traffic. Skena is the leaner default for steady, read-heavy apps that want one predictable bill; its data-client seam is the graduation path to Postgres when writes demand it.
faq
Straight answers.
01Does PocketBase scale as well as Supabase?+
For reads, comfortably, Skena Dedicated is load-tested at 15,000 live connections, and SQLite serves unlimited concurrent readers. Its one hard limit is the single SQLite writer; when sustained writes become the bottleneck, Skena's data-client seam graduates you to Postgres.
02What is Vercel bill shock?+
Vercel Pro is usage-based with no hard spend cap by default, beyond the included tier you pay per GB and per million requests, uncapped, unless you opt into spend management (which checks usage only every few minutes). A flat box has no such mechanism.
03Why does Supabase's realtime limit matter?+
Supabase Pro caps realtime at 500 concurrent connections unless you disable the spend cap (then it's usage-billed) or pay for Team. Skena Dedicated is load-tested at 15,000 live connections for one flat price.
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