Guide
The Blaze plan free tier: what you get without paying
November 1, 2026 · 5 min read
Upgrading to Blaze doesn't end the free usage. The no-cost quotas per product, how they reset, the catches, and what you pay once you go past them.
Is the Blaze plan free?
Partly. Blaze is pay as you go, but it keeps the no-cost usage of the free Spark plan: Firebase's pricing page lists "No-cost usage from Spark plan included" among Blaze's features (Firebase pricing). A small app can run on Blaze for months and pay $0. What changes is that past those quotas you pay, and nothing stops the bill for you.
What's included at no cost
These are the no-cost amounts on Blaze, per project, as Firebase lists them:
| Product | Included at no cost |
|---|---|
| Cloud Firestore | 50,000 reads, 20,000 writes and 20,000 deletes a day; 1 GiB stored; 10 GiB of egress a month |
| Cloud Functions | 2 million invocations, 400,000 GB-seconds and 200,000 CPU-seconds a month; 5 GB outbound a month |
| Hosting | 10 GB stored; 360 MB transferred a day |
| Realtime Database | 1 GB stored; 360 MB downloaded a day |
| Cloud Storage | Default bucket: 5 GB-months stored, 100 GB downloaded, 5,000 uploads and 50,000 downloads a month |
| Authentication | 50,000 monthly active users (phone sign-in is billed per SMS) |
| App Hosting | 10 GiB of outgoing bandwidth a month; 5 GB stored |
| SQL Connect | 250,000 operations and 10 GiB of egress a month, plus a 3-month trial of the first Cloud SQL instance |
Cloud Run, Firebase AI Logic (Gemini) and the other Google Cloud services a project uses have no allowance on Firebase's pricing page: they follow Google Cloud or Gemini API pricing.
Daily, not monthly
Most of these quotas don't add up over the month. Firebase notes that "No-cost usage on Blaze plan is calculated daily", and for Firestore Google adds: "Quotas are applied daily and reset around midnight Pacific time." (Firestore pricing). 50,000 reads a day is not 1.5 million a month to spend as you like: one busy day goes over even if the rest of the month is quiet, and unused quota doesn't carry over.
The catches
- One free Firestore database. Google's words: "Firestore allows exactly one free database per project." Named databases you add get no free quota and are billed from the first read.
- Storage regions. For Cloud Storage, the pricing page says "No-cost quotas are only available for buckets in the following regions": us-central1, us-west1 and us-east1. A bucket in Europe or Asia pays from the first gigabyte.
- Deploys use Google Cloud too. Deploying functions runs Cloud Build (120 build minutes a day at no cost) and stores container images in Artifact Registry (500 MB at no cost).
- No cap. The free tier is not a limit. Past it, Firebase bills the rest, and the budget you set when upgrading only sends alerts (why budget alerts don't stop your bill).
What going past it costs
Past the quota, Firestore in us-central1 costs $0.03 per 100,000 reads, $0.09 per 100,000 writes and $0.01 per 100,000 deletes (Firestore pricing). An app doing 1 million reads a day pays for 950,000 of them: about $0.29 a day, under $9 a month. Cheap, until something goes wrong.
The same price turns a bug into a bill. A page that reads a whole collection on every visit can do 1 billion reads in a day: about $300, every day, until someone notices. That's how a $30,356 bill in 72 hours happened.
Staying in the free tier on purpose
Set a small budget so you hear about the first dollar, cap your function instances and add an automatic action for when usage jumps: how to limit Firebase spending covers each of these. FireShield does the last part for you: it watches each service's usage, alerts you within minutes of a spike and can switch off the expensive parts, or the billing, before the free tier becomes a bill.
