Cloud Firestore Pricing 2026

Cloud Firestore's free Spark Plan includes 50,000 document reads per day, 20,000 document writes per day, 20,000 document deletes per day, 1 GiB of stored data, and 10 GiB of outbound data transfer per month. These quotas reset daily at midnight Pacific time and apply only to the default database. Named (non-default) databases, TTL deletes, point-in-time recovery (PITR) data, backups, and restore operations all require billing to be enabled regardless of usage volume.

When you attach a realtime listener, you are charged for a read each time a document in the result set is added or updated, and when a document is removed from the result set because the document changed (not for deletions). Additionally, if offline persistence is enabled and the listener is disconnected for more than 30 minutes, you are charged for all documents as if issuing a brand-new query. If offline persistence is disabled, every reconnect — even brief network interruptions — triggers a full re-read charge.

No — unlike most GCP services, Firestore read and write operations do not support configurable quota limits. You cannot set a hard cap that stops Firestore from processing operations once a threshold is reached. The only protection available is setting GCP billing budget alerts, which send notifications but do not stop usage. The recommended approach is to design your app to avoid runaway patterns (no infinite listeners, no unbounded loops that trigger writes) and monitor Cloud Monitoring metrics for anomalous spikes.

For small apps that stay within or near the free tier, Firestore is dramatically cheaper than managed SQL databases. A managed PostgreSQL instance (e.g., Cloud SQL) carries a fixed monthly cost of roughly $50/month or more for a production instance, while Firestore costs nothing for apps with a few hundred users running well-optimized queries. The cost advantage narrows at high scale or with access patterns that generate excessive reads.

Several patterns significantly inflate Firestore costs: (1) SQL-style normalized data models where each user action requires multiple separate document reads, (2) Realtime listeners attached to large or frequently-updated collections, (3) Security rules that read additional documents for authorization checks, (4) High-frequency small write workloads such as IoT telemetry, per-event analytics, or chat messages, and (5) Using multi-region database configuration when single-region would suffice at half the price.

At small scale (400–600 users), Firestore costs under $0.50/month with well-optimized queries. At 3,000 daily active users with 20 reads and 10 writes each per day, expect roughly $5.40/month. At 100,000 daily active users with 1 read and 1 write each per day, costs are approximately $7.20/month. Costs scale predictably with usage, and many apps run entirely within the free tier.

It depends on the workload. A Firebase team member confirmed that Firestore has lower per-GiB storage costs, making it cheaper for storage-heavy apps. However, for high-frequency small-write workloads — such as IoT devices writing a few times per second — Firestore's per-operation pricing can be significantly more expensive because it charges per document operation rather than by data size.

The Spark (No-cost) plan includes 50,000 document reads per day, 20,000 document writes per day, 20,000 document deletes per day, 1 GiB of stored data, and 10 GiB of outbound data transfer per month. These quotas apply only to the default database — named databases have no free quota and require billing from the first operation. Features like backups, PITR, and TTL deletes also require a billing account regardless of other usage.

Yes — the Spark (No-cost) plan is permanently free within daily limits, and the Blaze (Pay as you go) plan preserves those same free-tier quotas. However, Cloud Functions (commonly used with Firestore) require a billing account to be attached even to access their own free tier. Additionally, enabling minInstances on Cloud Functions to avoid cold starts negates the scale-to-$0 benefit, as idle instances are billed continuously.

EU compliance is an active concern for some developers. At least one developer reported having lawyers review EU legislation before committing to Firebase as a backend. Google offers EU multi-region database locations for Firestore, but whether this satisfies specific GDPR obligations depends on your data processing agreements and the nature of personal data involved — legal review is advisable.