Convex Pricing (2026): Pay for Traffic Before Seats

Convex costs $0 on Free and Starter, $25 per developer per month on Professional, and at least $2,500 per month on Business. The sharp call is to pay for traffic on Starter before paying for seats, unless a production control or the jump from S16 to S256 is the reason to upgrade.

Convex pricing at a glance

Convex has five plan names but only three practical buying decisions: accept hard Free caps, put a card behind $0-base Starter, or buy Professional capacity and controls per developer. Business and Enterprise begin when procurement, isolation, or an SLA matters more than the self-serve bill.

These prices were verified against Convex's live pricing page, limits documentation, and enterprise page on August 18, 2026.

What the Convex Free plan really allows

Free is enough for a serious prototype because the product surface is not stripped down. It includes the reactive database, file storage, text and vector search, scheduled jobs, authentication, Node.js actions, health insights, preview deployments, and a selectable data region. The economic limit is capacity, not a missing core backend.

The Free allowance is measured across the whole team. It includes 1 million function calls per month, 20 action GB-hours, 0.5 GB of database storage, 1 GB of file storage, 0.5 GB of search storage, 1 GB of database I/O, 3,000 search query-GBs, and 1 GB of data egress. Up to 6 developers can share 40 deployments.

Free and Starter run on Convex's S16 class. That gives a deployment 1,000 concurrent sessions, 16 concurrent queries, 16 concurrent mutations, 64 concurrent actions, 64 concurrent Node actions, and 8 concurrent scheduled jobs. Those are engineering ceilings, not included billable units. A burst can hit concurrency before a monthly quota looks large.

The free-plan stop is firm. Convex sends warning emails as usage approaches a cap, but extended excess can make function calls return HTTP errors. Successfully committed data is not deleted. That makes Free safe for data retention, but not for a production workflow that must keep accepting writes through a launch spike.

Who never needs to pay? A personal project, a low-traffic internal tool, a classroom build, or a prototype used by friends can stay on Free indefinitely if the whole team's usage fits those caps. The moment downtime is more expensive than a small invoice, move to Starter. Starter preserves the same $0 base while letting the deployment keep serving traffic through metered usage.

Starter is the default paid path

Starter is the best-value Convex plan for most small teams because it charges for consumed resources without adding a seat fee. It was introduced specifically to remove the old jump from Free to a $25 subscription.

Compute begins with 1 million function calls and 20 action GB-hours. Above those amounts, Starter charges $2.20 per additional million calls and $0.33 per additional action GB-hour. Query and mutation compute remains free.

Storage has three meters. Database storage includes 0.5 GB, then costs $0.22 per additional GB per month. File storage includes 1 GB, then costs $0.033 per additional GB per month. Search storage includes 0.5 GB, then costs $0.55 per additional GB per month.

The remaining usage lines are easy to overlook. Database I/O includes 1 GB, then costs $0.22 per additional GB. Search includes 3,000 query-GBs, then costs $0.11 per additional 1,000 query-GBs. Egress includes 1 GB, then costs $0.132 per additional GB.

A worked Starter bill

A solo product using 10 million calls, 50 action GB-hours, 2 GB of database storage, 5 GB of database I/O, and 5 GB of egress would cost $31.438, or $31.44 as a budget line, in a US region:

• Calls: 9 million billable calls at $2.20 per million, or $19.80.
• Actions: 30 billable GB-hours at $0.33, or $9.90.
• Database storage: 1.5 billable GB at $0.22, or $0.33.
• Database I/O: 4 billable GB at $0.22, or $0.88.
• Egress: 4 billable GB at $0.132, or $0.528.

That full bill works out to about $0.00314 per 1,000 calls after all five lines are normalized by call count. The number is tiny because a call is not a customer outcome. Its value is comparative: the same workload fits inside Professional, so team size decides which plan wins.

Starter also has a built-in answer to bill anxiety. Per-deployment usage limits can warn or disable on daily or monthly UTC windows, while team spending limits control the dollar total. A disable threshold is a hard operational choice: it protects the card by taking the deployment offline until the window resets or the limit changes.

Professional buys headroom and production controls

Professional is worth $25 per developer when its included capacity or operational controls remove more risk than the seat fee adds. It supports 1 to 20 developers, up to 300 team deployments, and moves workloads from S16 to S256.

S256 raises the important concurrency ceilings to 10,000 sessions, 256 concurrent queries, 256 mutations, 512 Convex or HTTP actions, 256 Node actions, and 256 scheduled jobs. Professional also adds log streaming, exception reporting, daily backups, custom domains, email support, streaming data exports, a management API, a standard audit log, HIPAA and SOC 2 reports, and a BAA.

Its included usage is much larger: 25 million function calls, 250 action GB-hours, 50 GB of database storage, 100 GB of file storage, 1 GB of search storage, 50 GB of database I/O, 50,000 search query-GBs, and 50 GB of egress.

Overage rates fall slightly. Calls cost $2 per additional million, action compute costs $0.30 per additional GB-hour, database storage and database I/O each cost $0.20 per additional GB, file storage costs $0.03 per additional GB, search storage costs $0.50 per additional GB, search queries cost $0.10 per additional 1,000 query-GBs, and egress costs $0.12 per additional GB.

The break-even changes with developer count

At one developer, Starter's call charges reach the $25 Professional base at about 12.36 million total monthly calls. At two developers, the $50 Professional base catches Starter at about 23.73 million calls. At three developers, Professional costs $75 before usage, so calls alone do not justify it anywhere inside the 25 million-call allowance.

Action-heavy apps flip sooner. Starter reaches a one-seat Professional base at about 95.76 action GB-hours and a two-seat base at about 171.52 action GB-hours. Combined calls, actions, storage, I/O, and egress can move either crossover lower.

The worked 10-million-call workload makes the consequence concrete. Professional costs $25 for one developer, beating Starter's $31.44. The same usage costs $75 for three developers, so Starter wins by more than $43. The normalized monthly cost is about $0.00250 per 1,000 calls for one-seat Professional, but that falls apart as a decision metric when more seats are added without more traffic.

Professional publishes no annual commitment discount. Its annualized base is $300 per developer, and a six-developer team carries $1,800 per year before overage. Buy it monthly for the controls you need now, not for a hoped-for discount later.

Business and Enterprise buy risk controls

Business starts at a $2,500 monthly minimum and is sold month-to-month with no annual commitment. It covers 1 to 50 developers with no per-developer fee, plus SAML SSO, service SLAs, dedicated databases, custom deployments, and enterprise workflows. The minimum normalizes to $125 per seat-month at 20 developers and $50 per seat-month at 50 developers.

That is still not a seat-price bargain against Professional. Business earns its budget through isolation, procurement, performance, and support. A team that only wants more seats should not treat the $2,500 minimum as a volume discount.

Enterprise is custom-priced and removes the developer ceiling. It adds a custom MSA, bring-your-own-cloud support, SIEM integration, and precommit discounts on annual contracts. This is the only plan where Convex publishes an annual-discount path.

The public enterprise schedule also exposes the infrastructure bill. Dedicated D1024 is $2,800 per month and D2048 is $5,600 per month in US East. Dedicated calls cost $0.20 per million, query and mutation compute costs $0.45 per GB-hour, database storage costs $0.45 per GB-month, and database I/O costs $0.15 per GB. Convex runtime actions cost $0.16 per GB-hour CPU time and Node.js actions cost $0.32 per GB-hour. File storage is $0.03 per GB-month, search storage is $0.50 per GB-month, search queries are $0.10 per 1,000 query-GBs, and egress is $0.12 per GB.

The page lists the plan minimum and resource schedule separately. Ask sales how the minimum is applied to those resource charges before treating $2,500 as the final invoice.

Hidden costs that change the Convex bill

The biggest location cost is not a rounding error. Convex's published self-serve rates are for US regions. EU resource pricing is 1.3 times the US rate, and paid EU deployments do not receive the US included usage allowances. A Professional deployment in Europe therefore should not be budgeted as $25 per seat with 25 million calls included.

Indexes can turn a small database into a larger bill. Convex counts rows and indexes in database storage, and each index is priced as another copy of its table. A heavily indexed 10 GB table can consume materially more than 10 GB of billable database storage.

Calls are broader than button clicks. Explicit client calls, scheduled executions, subscription updates, and file accesses all count. A reactive screen can produce more function calls than a simple request count suggests because live subscription updates are part of the meter.

Every included resource is pooled at team level. Forty deployments do not each receive a Free allowance, and 300 Professional deployments do not each receive 25 million calls. Development, preview, and production usage roll into the same team totals.

Search has two separate lines: index storage and query-GBs. A small number of searches over a large index can consume more query-GBs than a high count over a compact index. Budget both the size of searchable data and the work required per query.

There is no published refund rule on Convex's live software pricing FAQ. Professional also has no annual discount, Business is explicitly month-to-month, and only Enterprise advertises annual precommit discounts. Get any exception in writing before treating cancellation or refund flexibility as part of the purchase.

The April 2026 pricing update lowered one meaningful operating line. Data egress replaced file bandwidth at $0.12 per GB, almost three times cheaper than the old rate, while Professional deployments rose from 120 to 300. The same update launched Business and Enterprise. Any older estimate built around 120 deployments or the previous bandwidth line is stale.

Convex vs Supabase, Firebase, and Neon on price

The alternatives all start near $0, but they charge for different things. Convex meters application-backend work, Supabase combines an organization plan with per-project Postgres compute, Neon meters serverless Postgres compute and storage, and Firebase fragments a bill across Google services. The cheapest headline is not the cheapest architecture.

Supabase: $25 buys one Micro production project

Supabase starts at $0 and sells Pro from $25 per organization per month. The Pro fee includes a $10 monthly compute credit that covers one Micro project, plus 100,000 monthly active users, 8 GB of database disk, 250 GB of egress, 100 GB of file storage, daily backups, and seven days of logs.

That makes one small Supabase production backend and one-seat Convex Professional the same $25 base. The bill diverges as the organization adds projects or Convex adds developers. Supabase charges additional projects from $10 per month and meters compute per project; Convex Professional charges another $25 for each developer but pools usage across the team.

Choose Supabase when a dedicated Postgres database is part of the requirement. Choose Convex when its TypeScript-native reactive model removes enough backend and live-update work to justify the different data model. The full Supabase pricing breakdown covers its compute credits and organization-wide overages.

Neon: $15.19 for an intermittent Postgres workload

Neon starts at $0 with 100 projects, 100 CU-hours per month per project, 0.5 GB of storage per project, sizes up to 2 CU, and unlimited team members. A CU-hour is one unit of Postgres compute used for one hour.

Launch has no monthly minimum. It charges $0.106 per CU-hour and $0.35 per GB-month. Neon's example intermittent workload of 140 CU-hours and 1 GB of storage computes to $15.19 per month, close to the vendor's displayed $15 typical spend.

That is cheaper than either $25 production base when the buyer wants a database and can supply the rest of the backend. The trade is scope: Convex includes functions, reactive subscriptions, search, files, and scheduling as one application backend, while Neon's cost here is Postgres compute and storage. Paid Neon also meters from zero, so its Free allowances do not carry into Launch.

Firebase: $0 base, then several meters

Firebase offers the no-cost Spark plan and pay-as-you-go Blaze. Spark includes 1 GiB of Firestore data, 10 GiB of monthly Firestore egress, 20,000 writes per day, 50,000 reads per day, and 20,000 deletes per day.

Blaze preserves no-cost quotas, then meters by product. Cloud Functions includes 2 million invocations per month and charges $0.40 per additional million, so 10 million invocations cost $3.20 for the invocation line alone. Compute, networking, Firestore operations, storage, authentication, and any other Google Cloud services remain separate.

Firebase can therefore look cheaper for a mobile app that stays inside multiple free quotas, but its final bill is harder to normalize from one traffic number. Use the Firebase pricing breakdown and price the services the app actually calls. If the choice is mainly Postgres versus Google's document stack, the Supabase vs Firebase decision guide covers the architecture before the invoice.

The clean decision rule is this: choose Convex for a TypeScript application whose reactive data flow is the product, Supabase for a broader Postgres backend, Neon for database-first serverless Postgres, and Firebase for a Google-native mobile stack. Moving later can cost more than the first year's hosting difference.

Who should pay for Convex, and who should skip it?

Convex is worth paying for when live data, transactions, functions, files, search, and scheduled work belong in one TypeScript backend. A solo founder with meaningful traffic can reach Professional's break-even quickly, while a larger team with the same traffic should often stay on Starter until a feature or concurrency gate forces the move.

Its wall is the data model. Convex does not use SQL as its application query language. If the team depends on existing Postgres tooling, SQL joins, database-specific extensions, or an ORM-heavy codebase, the migration cost can outweigh a lower backend workload. The live plan grid also marks the analytics engine as unavailable on Free and Starter and still "Soon" on the paid tiers.

Data can leave through dashboard backups or continuous Fivetran export, but Convex marks Data Import and Export as beta. Portability of records is not portability of application logic.

The Monday move: measure before buying seats

The best next step is not an annual forecast. It is one measured month on the cheapest plan that keeps the application safe.

1. 1

   Start on Free or Starter

   Use Free while hard limits are acceptable. Add a card and move to Starter before production traffic makes HTTP errors an unacceptable failure mode. Do not buy Professional simply because the app is public.

2. 2

   Set the failure mode

   Add warning thresholds first. Use a disable threshold only where downtime is cheaper than overage, and remember that daily and monthly windows reset on UTC boundaries.

3. 3

   Record the billable five

   Track calls, action GB-hours, database storage, database I/O, and egress for a representative month. Add search storage and query-GBs if the product uses text or vector search.

4. 4

   Apply the seat-aware crossover

   For one developer, scrutinize Professional near 12.36 million calls or 95.76 action GB-hours. For two, use 23.73 million calls or 171.52 action GB-hours. For three or more, price the $25 seat multiplier before assuming the larger allowance saves money.

5. 5

   Buy controls deliberately

   Upgrade early when S256 concurrency, daily backups, log streaming, a custom domain, support, or compliance is worth more than the price gap. Move to Business only when SSO, an SLA, dedicated capacity, or procurement requires it.

That is the Monday move: put the app on Starter, set a warning limit, name one owner for the bill, and schedule the Professional decision after a measured month.

Frequently asked questions

Is Convex free?

Yes. Free costs $0 and supports up to 6 developers, 40 deployments, 1 million monthly calls, and the other published hard caps. Starter also has a $0 base, but it requires billing and charges for usage beyond those allowances.

Does Convex have a student discount?

Convex does not publish a student-specific discount. The practical student offer is Free or Starter for up to 6 developers; the vendor tied that expanded team limit to college hackathons and group projects.

Does Convex offer startup credits?

Yes. Eligible startups can receive up to one year of Professional with no seat fees and 30% off usage-based fees up to $30,000. Published eligibility includes Series A or earlier, fewer than 20 employees, a company under 3 years old, and less than $3 million raised.

What is the Convex refund policy?

Convex's public software pricing FAQ does not publish a refund rule. Ask support for written confirmation before upgrading if refund eligibility affects the purchase.

Is annual Convex billing cheaper?

Not on the self-serve plans. Professional publishes no annual discount, and Business is month-to-month with no annual commitment. Enterprise can receive precommit discounts on annual contracts.

Did Convex pricing change in 2026?

Yes. The April 2026 update launched Business and Enterprise, raised Professional's deployment allowance from 120 to 300, and replaced file bandwidth with data egress at $0.12 per GB. EU hosting also launched with 1.3 times resource pricing and no US included allowances on paid deployments.

Is Convex cheaper than Supabase?

It can be. One developer pays a $25 base on either Convex Professional or Supabase Pro, while Convex Starter can be below or above that depending on usage. Supabase adds project compute; Convex adds developer seats. The cheaper choice follows the architecture and team shape.

Are Convex allowances per project or per team?

They are per team. Usage across development, preview, and production projects is added together before Convex applies the included amount or overage rate.

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