Every indie developer I know has the same problem. It's not ideas. It's not code. It's the $10/month × 12 half-finished projects problem.
Most backend platforms charge per project. Each one needs its own compute instance, its own bill. So your dead side project from last March is still quietly charging you rent. At some point you stop starting new things — not because you ran out of ideas, but because you ran out of budget for ideas.
I built PocketBase Cloud to break that math. Here's a tour of what it does and the reasoning behind each piece.
1. You pay for a server, not per project
This is the whole thesis, so let's start here.
On the Pro plan, you rent a dedicated server (from ~$13/month for 2 cores / 4 GB) and run as many PocketBase instances on it as you want. Each one is fully isolated — own database, own credentials, own URL. Since PocketBase is a ~15 MB binary, a 2-core box comfortably hosts around 10 instances.
Run the numbers against a per-project platform:
| Projects | PocketBase Cloud | Per-project pricing (e.g. Supabase) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | $5/mo (Starter) | $25/mo |
| 3 | $11/mo (Starter + add-ons) | ~$45/mo |
| 10 | ~$13/mo (one Pro server) | ~$115/mo |
Ten projects for roughly the price of one. Your costs stay flat while your project count multiplies — which, if you're an agency doing per-client deployments or an indie hacker with a graveyard of experiments, is the only line on this page that matters.
2. Deploy in 30 seconds, zero server config
Click deploy, pick a region, and ~30 seconds later you have a live PocketBase instance with a URL and a working admin dashboard. No VPS provisioning, no nginx, no certbot, no systemd unit files.
The pitch is boring on purpose: the backend should be the part you don't think about.
3. Real-time works out of the box
PocketBase streams record changes over Server-Sent Events, and subscriptions respect your API rules automatically. No extra infrastructure, no separate realtime service to wire up:
pb.collection("messages").subscribe("*", (e) => {
if (e.action === "create") addMessage(e.record);
});
That's the entire realtime setup. SSE also passes cleanly through ordinary HTTPS proxies — no special WebSocket infrastructure required. And it scales further than the lightweight design suggests: a single instance on 2 cores / 4 GB handles 1,000+ concurrent realtime connections.
4. Security you don't configure
Every instance gets automatic SSL certificates, localized firewall rules, DDoS protection, and automated backups — set up for you, not documented for you to set up.
I'm specifically proud of the backups. Self-hosting PocketBase is famously easy right up until the day you realize you never actually tested your restore path.
5. Frontend hosting is included
Static site hosting ships on every plan — 5 frontends on Free and Starter, unlimited on Pro.
Most backend platforms don't host frontends at all, which means pairing them with Vercel or Netlify: another dashboard, another bill, another free tier with its own limits, and CORS config between them. Here your frontend, database, and backend live in one project, on one bill.
6. Full backends, not just functions (Pro)
JavaScript hooks are included on every plan — custom API routes, record event handlers, cron jobs, outbound HTTP calls — running inside your instance right next to your data. Critically: no invocation billing. A hook that fires a million times costs exactly the same as one that fires once. Compare that to per-invocation edge function pricing, where your costs scale with your traffic.
And when a workload outgrows hooks — long-running jobs, websockets, heavy dependencies, a full Next.js app — Pro runs full backend containers (Node.js, Deno, Bun, Next.js) on your dedicated server at the server's flat price. No per-request billing. This is the piece that surprises people most, because most backend-as-a-service platforms have no equivalent at all: anything beyond their function model means renting a separate service with its own bill.
I use this myself — my World Cup live-score app runs its Socket.io backend, its React PWA, and its PocketBase instance all on the same platform.
7. Six global regions
Deploy close to your users:
🇩🇪 Falkenstein · 🇩🇪 Nuremberg · 🇫🇮 Helsinki · 🇺🇸 Ashburn, VA · 🇺🇸 Hillsboro, OR · 🇸🇬 Singapore
Europe, North America, and Asia-Pacific covered.
8. Live monitoring (Pro)
CPU, memory, and bandwidth for every instance, in real time, from one unified dashboard. When you're running ten projects on one server, knowing which one is eating the box isn't a nice-to-have.
9. AI-agent friendly
This one's newer and I like it a lot: the docs ship with prompts ready for your AI agent/LLM to build against. If you're using Claude Code, Cursor, or similar to scaffold an app, you can point it at the docs and let it wire up the backend directly instead of hallucinating an API surface.
10. No egress meter
Bandwidth is included with your server. There's no per-GB egress billing, so a traffic spike or a popular file download doesn't turn into a surprise invoice. Storage scales with your plan (50 MB Free / 3 GB Starter / your server's disk on Pro), and PocketBase also supports S3-compatible storage if you want to plug in a bucket at commodity prices.
Predictable beats cheap-until-it-isn't.
The honest part
I'm not going to pretend this fits everyone. PocketBase is SQLite under the hood: writes are serialized, and you scale vertically by getting a bigger server. If your workload is genuinely write-heavy at high concurrency, or you depend on Postgres extensions like PostGIS or pgvector, use Postgres — Supabase is excellent and I'd tell you to go use it.
But most apps are read-heavy CRUD. SaaS dashboards, mobile backends, content sites. For those, SQLite's write serialization is never the bottleneck, and you get to have one simple system you fully understand instead of a multi-container stack.
I wrote up the full comparison — architecture, auth, permissions, realtime, extensibility — here: PocketBase vs Supabase. It's deliberately honest about where PocketBase loses.
Try it
The Free plan gets you 1 instance + 5 frontends, and instances stay running — no hibernation, no cold starts.
If you're sitting on a pile of side projects you've been rationing your budget across, I'd love to hear what you'd deploy first. And if something's rough, tell me — it's an indie product and comments genuinely shape the roadmap. 🚀
Top comments (1)
Everyone can try the one-month free plan.