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The Firebase alternative that bills by the second, not the read
Firebase bills by the read and gives you functions instead of a server. Lizard gives you PostgreSQL 18, Redis 8, S3-compatible object storage, and a long-lived process to put in front of them — provisioned with one command and billed by the second on measured use.
Why developers look for a Firebase alternative
The bill scales with reads, not users
Firestore on Blaze charges $0.06 per 100,000 reads, $0.18 per 100,000 writes, and $0.18 per GiB stored. A list screen that reads 40 documents per open is a rounding error at 100 users and a line item at 100,000.
Firestore is not relational
Every join becomes a denormalisation and every denormalisation becomes a fan-out write, which is billed. Firebase SQL Connect, renamed from Data Connect in April 2026, now offers a Postgres path — which concedes the point.
There is no server
Nothing in Firebase stays alive between requests. Functions and App Hosting are both request-driven, so a long-lived consumer or an open socket has no home.
One SDK owns everything
Auth, database, storage, functions, and hosting are a single product. The pieces share one project, one console, and one bill, and the client SDK pulls you into using all of them.
Lizard vs Firebase
Every figure read off Firebase’s published pricing and our own. Last verified: 27 August 2026.
| Compared by | Lizard | Firebase |
|---|---|---|
| Database | PostgreSQL 18, relational, ready in seconds | Firestore, a document store |
| Database billing | Measured CPU, memory and disk, per second | $0.06 per 100,000 reads, $0.18 per 100,000 writes, $0.18 per GiB stored |
| Server code | A long-lived process, no execution ceiling | Cloud Functions, per invocation, with limits |
| WebSockets and streaming | Ordinary long-lived connections | Streaming yes, on 2nd gen callable functions; WebSockets no |
| Cache | Managed Redis 8, one command | No Firebase product — Google Cloud Memorystore over VPC |
| Object storage | S3-compatible, every AWS SDK works | Cloud Storage for Firebase |
| Auth | Bring your own — Firebase Auth included, if you like it | Firebase Auth, first-party and genuinely good |
| Free tier | $5 of credit, no card | 50,000 reads, 20,000 writes and 20,000 deletes a day, kept on Blaze |
When Firebase is the better choice
A mobile app that is mostly a client talking to a data store, especially early on. Firebase Auth, Cloud Messaging, offline sync, and the client SDKs are excellent and hard to reproduce, and the free tier carries a real product a long way. Leaving Firestore also does not mean leaving Firebase Auth or Cloud Messaging — those compose fine with any backend.
Moving from Firebase
No Dockerfile required — lizardpack detects the stack and writes one on the build node. If your repo already has a Dockerfile, it is used as it stands.
Frequently asked questions
Supabase is the closest match to Firebase’s whole product surface, with Postgres instead of Firestore. Appwrite and PocketBase are the self-hostable options. If the app has outgrown a client-side data layer, running your own API next to a managed Postgres — which on Lizard is one command — is usually the better shape.
Yes, and it is often the cheapest first step. Firebase Auth issues JWTs your own backend can verify with Google’s public keys, so you can move the data layer to Postgres while sign-in stays exactly where it is. Cloud Messaging composes the same way.
Export the collections with gcloud firestore export, or walk them with the Admin SDK, then design the relational schema first rather than copying document shapes over — that redesign is most of the work. Dual-write during the transition, move reads behind a feature flag, then cut over.
Not one that stays awake. Cloud Functions run per invocation with cold starts and execution limits, and Firebase App Hosting deploys to Cloud Run but is still request-driven. For a process that has to hold state between requests — a queue consumer, a WebSocket server, a scheduler — you need a platform that runs one.
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