Pricing
There is no price, because there is nobody to pay.
Baselyra is Apache-2.0 software you run on your own machine. There is no account to create, no key to request, no seat count, no monthly active user band and no egress meter. The only invoice involved is the one your hosting provider already sends you.
What it costs to run
A 1 vCPU, 1 GB VPS is enough for development and a small
production app; 2 GB is the comfortable default. At idle expect roughly 250–400 MB
for Postgres on the shipped shared_buffers=256MB and 80–150 MB for the
Node process. Whatever your provider charges for that box is the whole bill.
What it costs to grow
Nothing changes shape. Ten users and ten thousand users are the same two containers; you resize the box. There is no tier that unlocks row level security, no add-on for realtime, no per-project fee and no point at which a feature you were using starts costing money.
What it costs to leave
Your data is in Postgres tables you can psql into and
files on a volume you can tar. scripts/backup.sh writes both.
Moving to Supabase, to RDS, or to a plain Postgres of your own is a
pg_dump away, because nothing is stored behind an abstraction.
The licence
Apache-2.0, which is a specific set of permissions
“Free” is vague and “open source” is often used loosely, so here is what the licence in the repository actually grants you. It is the full Apache License 2.0, not a source-available licence with a commercial-use clause bolted on.
- Use it commercially, in production, for a paying product.
- Modify it, and keep those modifications private.
- Redistribute it, modified or not.
- Build a business on top of it, including a hosted one.
- Use the patent grant that comes with the licence.
- Run as many instances as you like, for as many clients as you like.
- Keep the copyright and licence notices in copies you distribute.
- State significant changes you made to the files.
- Not use the project’s name or marks to endorse your derivative.
- Accept that it comes with no warranty and no liability — the same clause every permissive licence carries, and the honest one for software you self-host.
This is a summary. The licence itself is authoritative
Pricing models, not prices
What you are choosing between
Competitors’ numbers change, so quoting them here would be stale within a quarter. The shape of what you pay is the durable difference, and it is the thing that surprises people at three in the morning when a job loops.
| You are billed for | Baselyra | Supabase | Appwrite Cloud | Firebase |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The software | nothing, Apache-2.0 | free, mostly Apache-2.0 | free, BSD-3-Clause | proprietary |
| Hosting | your VPS bill | your VPS bill, or their tiers | your VPS bill, or their tiers | theirs only |
| Monthly active users | not counted | free band, then per MAU | free band, then per MAU | free band, then per MAU |
| Database reads and writes | not metered | not metered | not metered | per document read, write, delete |
| Bandwidth out | your provider’s allowance | metered above a band | metered above a band | metered |
| Storage and file egress | your disk | per GB stored and served | per GB stored and served | per GB stored and served |
| Realtime connections | not counted | concurrent-peak bands | bands | concurrent-connection bands |
| Function invocations | no functions to invoke | per invocation above a band | per execution above a band | per invocation and GB-second |
| Projects | one instance, one project | per project, above the free one | per project | per project |
| Pausing when idle | never | free projects pause | varies by plan | no |
| A surprise bill is possible | no — the box is a fixed price | yes, from egress and MAU | yes, from egress and MAU | yes, famously |
Read as a shape, not a scoreboard: a metered platform is often cheaper than a VPS at small scale, and always more predictable to start with. The trade is that your cost curve belongs to someone else. The feature-by-feature comparison
The other side
What free does not mean
Self-hosting moves work rather than deleting it. If any line below is a dealbreaker, a managed platform is the right answer and there is no shame in the trade.
You are on call
Nobody is paged when your instance stops answering at 3am. There is no status page but the one you build and no SLA at all.
Backups are yours
There are scripts —
scripts/backup.sh and restore.sh — and a documented procedure,
but running them on a schedule and testing a restore is your job. An untested backup is not a
backup.
Updates are yours
docker compose pull &&
docker compose up -d is the whole upgrade, and it still has to be somebody’s
calendar entry. Security fixes reach you when you pull them.
Support is a repository
Issues and pull requests, answered by whoever is around. No support contract exists to buy, so “we escalated it” is not an option available to you.
No hosted tier, at all
There is no Baselyra cloud waiting behind a waitlist. If you want somebody else to run it, run it on a managed VPS and the operating is still yours.
Some things are simply absent
Edge functions, S3 back ends, image transforms, read replicas, branching. Named plainly on the roadmap rather than buried.
Questions
The ones that follow “it is free”
Is this open core, with the good parts behind a paid edition?
No. There is one edition. Everything on this site is in the repository under Apache-2.0, including the Studio, the import tooling and the AI relay. There is no enterprise build, no licence key and no feature that checks whether you paid.
Will the licence change later?
Nobody can promise the future of a project honestly. What is true is that the code released under Apache-2.0 stays Apache-2.0 — a later relicence cannot retroactively cover what has already shipped, and anyone may fork the last permissive commit. That is the actual protection a licence gives you, and it is worth more than a promise on a marketing page.
Can I sell a product built on it? Can I host it for clients?
Yes to both, and you owe nothing. Apache-2.0 has no commercial-use restriction and no network-use clause. Keep the notices, say what you changed, and do not imply the project endorses you.
Does it phone home?
No. There is no analytics code in the source to disable and no endpoint it reports to. The only outbound calls a running instance makes are the ones you configure: your SMTP host, an SMS provider, a sign-in provider during a login, and DeepSeek if you set a key.
How is the project funded, then?
It is not a company and there is no funding to disclose. It is an open-source project that exists because the two-container version of this idea was worth building. Contributions are the currency: issues, fixes, documentation, a provider you needed that was not there.
What happens if the project stops being maintained?
Your instance keeps running — it is two containers on your own machine and nothing expires. The source is Apache-2.0, the whole server is eight runtime dependencies and the data is plain Postgres, so forking it or migrating off it are both realistic options rather than theoretical ones. That is a great deal more than can be said for a managed platform that sunsets a product.
Nothing to sign up for
The evaluation is: clone it and see.
No trial period, no sales call, no card. If it does not
suit you, docker compose down -v and you are back where you started.