2026-08-13 · 5 min read

Scaling without surprise bills: how Rapibase's flat price works

The dominant pattern in managed backends is usage-based pricing: you pay per active user, per row read, per GB transferred, per function invocation. It sounds fair — “pay for what you use” — until your app works well and the bill grows faster than your revenue. Or worse: until a bug loops requests over a weekend and Monday brings an invoice you don't recognize. That's not a rare story; it's an entire genre of posts on developer forums.

Our model: a price you can recite from memory

$20 per project per month. Flat. Every project is a dedicated instance — Postgres 16 with pgvector, auth, S3 storage, realtime, TypeScript functions, and frontend hosting — and its price doesn't depend on how much you use it:

• No charge per registered or active user.
• No charge per request, row read, or query.
• No charge per function invocation or realtime message.
• Your app with 100 users and your app with 100,000 pay the same.

Real control over spend

• 7-day trial, no card: build first, pay once it works.
• Pause = stop paying: a paused project isn't billed (prorated) and its data stays intact until you resume it. Three projects but only one moving this month? Pause two, pay for one.
• Team at $500/month with 15 projects for teams and agencies — a third of the per-project price.
• No lock-in: the core is open source. If you'd rather self-host someday, you export your data over psql and take everything with you.

The clear print (not the fine print)

How can it be flat? Because every instance is yours and runs on hardware sized for the real usage of a production application — we don't bill your traffic, but we do ask for reasonable use: if a project needs resources outside the norm (mining, mass scraping, workloads that degrade the platform), we talk to you about a custom plan rather than surprising you with a charge. It's spelled out in the terms of service. What will never happen: normal success — more users, more queries, more deploys — changing your price.

Run the numbers on your own case

Take the app you have or the one you're planning, estimate its users a year from now, and price the bill on any usage-based backend with their public calculators. Then compare that to $20. For the vast majority of applications — small and mid-size SaaS, internal apps, products that grow — the 12-month difference isn't a nuance: it's hundreds or thousands of dollars.