Supabase point-in-time recovery: what it costs, what it misses

You are on the Supabase Pro plan, something went wrong at a time you could write down, and last night's backup is older than the mistake. Somewhere in the dashboard there is a toggle called Point in Time Recovery with a price beside it, and the question is whether that price buys what you think it buys.

Here is the part that gets flattened in every roundup: point-in-time recovery and a backup you hold are two different products, and turning on the first does nothing about what the second is for. Both are filed under Backups in the dashboard, which is most of the reason this is confusing.

It helps to think of one as a recording and the other as a photograph. A daily backup is a photograph: one frame a day, taken at a fixed hour, and you can carry it out of the building. Point-in-time recovery is the building's own camera, running continuously, which lets you stop on any frame you like. The tapes are in the basement and they go back a week.

What is point-in-time recovery in Supabase?

It is a way to put your database back to a specific moment rather than to a specific backup.

Supabase builds it out of two things running together. The first is a physical backup, a snapshot of the database files taken daily. The second is Write Ahead Log archiving: Postgres keeps a running record of every change it makes, and Supabase copies those files away at two-minute intervals, or immediately when one crosses a size threshold. A restore loads the snapshot and then replays the log forward until it reaches the moment you asked for.

That mechanism is where the precision comes from. Supabase describes the result as up to seconds of granularity, with a worst case they put at a Recovery Point Objective of two minutes, which in plain terms is the most you could lose off the end of the moment you picked.

Their backup documentation is the page to read for the current shape of all this. Everything below depends on numbers that belong to them.

How much does Supabase point-in-time recovery cost?

$100 a month for a seven-day window, on top of the Pro plan, which is $25 a month on its own.

Supabase bills the add-on by the hour and sells three window sizes:

There is a second line on the bill, and it is the one that catches people out. Point-in-time recovery requires at least the Small compute instance. A Pro project runs on Micro by default, which the $10 of compute credits included in the plan covers entirely; Small is around $15 a month, so the credits stop covering your compute and the remainder starts appearing on your invoice. The add-on is therefore a little more expensive than the number printed beside it.

It is available on Pro, Team and Enterprise. On the free plan there is nothing to add it to, because the free plan takes no automatic backups at all.

Check both figures against Supabase's own pricing page on the day you decide rather than against this one. They are theirs to change, and this page will not notice when they do.

When is point-in-time recovery worth the money?

When you can name the minute, and when the work either side of it matters.

A migration ran at 14:32 and took a column with it. A script you started at lunchtime wrote the wrong value into every row. An AI agent was given write access and used it. In all three you know when, and knowing when is the whole input. You pick 14:31, and the database comes back as it stood one minute before the damage.

The clause that costs money is the rest of that morning. Restoring last midnight's copy also removes every signup, order and message your users created since midnight, so undoing one mistake means accepting a second, smaller loss. With point-in-time recovery the morning's work stays.

While you are in the dashboard thinking about what could go wrong, it is worth knowing what your app already shows a stranger. Our free scan reads your live site from outside and tells you what it can see. It takes about 20 seconds and needs no account: scan your app.

What point-in-time recovery does not reach

Two: a mistake you notice after the window has moved on, and the account the whole arrangement lives inside.

A mistake you notice late. The window moves with today, so a seven-day window is always the last seven days and never a fixed week. That is generous for a deletion, which usually announces itself in minutes. It is no help at all with the quiet kind: a form that has been saving the wrong value since Tuesday fortnight, a column dropped in a migration nobody read closely, a field one script has been overwriting for a month. Those surface when a customer writes in, and a customer writing in is rarely within seven days of the cause.

The account the recovery lives in. The snapshots and the archived log sit inside your Supabase project, which makes them fast and makes them one click. It also means a suspended project, an expired card or a login you cannot get back takes the recovery down with the thing it was there to recover. That is a fair trade and not a flaw, and it is the reason a copy inside your account is only half a safety net.

Does point-in-time recovery cover my Storage files?

No. Supabase's own wording is that database backups do not include objects you store via the Storage API, and point-in-time recovery is a database feature.

Every avatar, uploaded PDF and product image your users added lives in Storage, which is a separate service. Your database holds the path to each file and none of their contents. So a database rewound to Tuesday points at whatever is in your buckets today, and a file deleted on Wednesday is still deleted after a recovery that worked perfectly.

Whatever else you decide on this page, your files need their own answer. Three ways to back up a Supabase database covers where each route leaves them.

Can a third-party tool give me point-in-time recovery?

No, and this is the one claim on the subject worth checking carefully, because it sounds like a feature comparison and it is a category difference.

Point-in-time recovery replays the write-ahead log, and that log is a file on the disk your database runs on. Reading it means standing on that machine. Every external backup tool, ours included, connects to your database the way your app does, asks it for its contents, and writes the answer down. What comes out is a logical dump: a complete, portable copy of everything in the database at the moment the dump ran.

A dump is the photograph again. You can carry it anywhere, load it into a brand-new project on a different account, and read it with ordinary Postgres tools that have never heard of Supabase. What you cannot do is stop between two dumps, because nothing was recording in between.

So the honest version of the comparison. If what you need is to land on 14:31, buy Supabase's add-on; nobody outside the platform is able to sell you that. A vendor advertising point-in-time recovery over a connection is describing a schedule, and one question separates the two: does their restore land on a minute you type, or on the last time their copy ran?

Point-in-time recovery, or a copy you hold?

Ask which disaster you are insuring against, because these two answer different ones.

Most apps with real customers in them want both, and the order is what to be deliberate about. A copy you hold is the one that survives everything, including the account, so it is the one to arrange first. The add-on is what you buy once you have worked out that losing a morning of orders would cost you more than it does.

What to do this week

Where Reeve Care fits

Care is the copy you hold, arranged for you, with a restore you press rather than assemble.

• Copies run on a schedule you do not have to remember, as often as every six hours on the higher plans, and a run that fails sends you an email rather than a silence.
• Each copy lives outside your Supabase account. Encrypted, on storage we hold, so a suspended project or a lost login does not take your backups with it.
• Every copy is read back before it counts. The date on your dashboard is the last copy that passed that check, never the last one attempted.
• Restoring is a button, and it takes a snapshot of the current state before it starts, so the restore itself has an undo.
• The files your users uploaded are copied too, once you connect your Storage buckets. That is a second key, asked for separately, because the key Supabase issues for Storage can write as well as read and we would rather ask than fold it in with one that cannot.

Care and the add-on are complementary, which is also how they are priced. Care starts at $49 a month for one app, against $100 for the add-on, and plenty of apps should have the first before they consider the second. Ours are list prices, and the pricing page is sometimes below the figure here and never above it. Every Supabase figure on this page is quoted from their own pages, never converted or estimated.

How a copy is taken, checked and put back is drawn out step by step on the Supabase backups page.

Before you close this tab, work out the number this whole decision turns on: how long a mistake could sit in your app before somebody noticed it. Under seven days and the add-on is buying you real precision on the day you need it. Longer than that and a wider window is not where the money should go, because the thing that reaches back further is a copy of your own. The 10-minute security checklist covers backups alongside the rest of what is worth confirming on a launched app.