Supabase Storage vs Uploadcare(2026)
Supabase Storage is better for teams that need integrated with supabase auth. Uploadcare is the stronger choice if pre-built upload ui (drop-in widget). Supabase Storage is freemium (from $25/month (included in Supabase)) and Uploadcare is freemium (from $29/month).
Full feature breakdown, pricing details, and pros & cons below.
By Bikram NathLast updated
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Supabase Storage
Supabase Storage is an S3-compatible object storage built on top of S3 with Postgres RLS policies for fine-grained access control.
Starting at $25/month (included in Supabase)
Visit Supabase StorageUploadcare
Uploadcare is a file upload and CDN platform with a pre-built upload widget, image transformations, and smart file delivery.
Starting at $29/month
Visit UploadcareHow Do Supabase Storage and Uploadcare Compare on Features?
| Feature | Supabase Storage | Uploadcare |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | freemium | freemium |
| Starting price | $25/month (included in Supabase) | $29/month |
| S3-compatible | ✓ | — |
| Postgres RLS policies | ✓ | — |
| CDN delivery | ✓ | ✓ |
| Image transformations | ✓ | ✓ |
| Resumable uploads | ✓ | — |
| Signed URLs | ✓ | — |
| Upload widget UI | — | ✓ |
| Virus scanning | — | ✓ |
| File groups | — | ✓ |
| Webhooks | — | ✓ |
Supabase Storage Pros and Cons vs Uploadcare
Supabase Storage
Uploadcare
Deep dive: Supabase Storage
When to choose Supabase Storage
Supabase Storage makes sense when a project is already running on the Supabase platform and needs file storage without adding a second vendor. The core value proposition is that storage access policies are written as Postgres RLS rules, which means the same permission model governing database rows also governs file buckets. There is no separate IAM system to learn or synchronize. Teams building user-generated content features, such as profile photos, document uploads, or media libraries, benefit most when those files are tied directly to authenticated users already managed in Supabase Auth. The S3-compatible API means existing tooling, including the AWS SDKs, can point at Supabase Storage endpoints without significant changes. Choose it when the team wants image transformations, CDN delivery, and resumable uploads without stitching together Cloudinary, a separate CDN, and a custom upload endpoint. Avoid it if the project is not already on Supabase, if compliance requirements demand specific data residency in regions Supabase does not currently serve, or if the storage workload is very high volume where S3 direct pricing would be meaningfully cheaper. It is also a poor fit for teams who need advanced lifecycle policies, intelligent tiering, or deep AWS ecosystem integrations like Lambda triggers on object creation, all of which S3 native handles with more maturity.
Real-world use case
A solo developer building a Next.js multi-tenant SaaS where each tenant uploads contract PDFs and profile images for around 200 active organizations. With Supabase Storage, the developer writes one RLS policy that checks the authenticated user's organization ID against a column in the objects metadata table, restricting reads and writes without any application-layer filtering code. The image transformation endpoint handles resizing profile photos to thumbnails on the fly, eliminating a Cloudinary subscription. Resumable uploads handle the occasional large PDF without custom chunking logic. The tradeoff: the developer is now deep in the Supabase ecosystem and every infrastructure decision, from region selection to scaling the database, is coupled to a single vendor. If Supabase raises prices or deprecates a feature, migrating storage means also migrating auth, the database, and edge functions simultaneously. For a solo developer at 200 tenants this coupling is probably worth the reduced operational surface. At 2000 tenants with serious SLA requirements, the lack of multi-region replication and the relative immaturity compared to S3 would be a real concern.
Hidden gotchas
The objects table in the storage schema is a real Postgres table, which means every file upload inserts a row. On the free tier and Pro tier, this table is not automatically vacuumed separately from application tables, and teams uploading thousands of small files can accumulate significant dead tuples that hurt query performance on the broader database. Monitoring autovacuum on storage.objects is something the documentation does not emphasize. Image transformations are proxied through a separate service and the first request for a transformed variant is noticeably slow, typically several hundred milliseconds, because the transform is computed on demand before being cached. There is a per-bucket file size limit and a per-project storage limit that applies to total bytes across all buckets, and hitting the project-level limit silently fails uploads rather than returning a clear error in some SDK versions. Signed URLs have a maximum expiry of around one week, which creates friction for use cases like long-lived download links in email campaigns. The CDN is not globally distributed at the same density as Cloudflare or AWS CloudFront, so latency to users in Southeast Asia or Africa can be noticeably higher than first-party CDN solutions. RLS policies on storage objects join against the auth.users table, which means a poorly written policy can produce a full table scan at upload time rather than an index lookup, and this does not surface as an obvious slow query without deliberate profiling.
Pricing breakdown
Supabase Storage is included in the Supabase Pro plan at $25 per month per project, which also covers the database and auth. The Pro plan includes 100 GB of storage and 200 GB of egress bandwidth per month. Beyond that, storage costs around $0.021 per GB per month and egress costs around $0.09 per GB. A project storing 500 GB of user files and serving 300 GB of egress monthly would pay roughly $25 base plus $8.40 for extra storage (400 GB at $0.021) plus $9.00 for extra egress (100 GB at $0.09), landing near $42 per month. Image transformation requests are billed separately at around $5 per 1000 origin requests beyond the free quota. For comparison, S3 plus CloudFront for the same workload would cost around $11 to $15 monthly at current AWS rates, though without the integrated auth and RLS layer.
Should You Use Supabase Storage or Uploadcare?
Choose Supabase Storage if…
- •Integrated with Supabase auth
- •Row-level security for storage
- •Good free tier
Choose Uploadcare if…
- •Pre-built upload UI (drop-in widget)
- •Good image transformation API
- •Virus scanning