# Firebase

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/databases/firebase/

Google's app development platform; this record covers its Spark and Blaze pricing plans and Cloud Firestore, a NoSQL document database billed per operation, GiB stored and GiB of egress.

## Who it suits

Apps that want a NoSQL document database with no plan fee: Firestore's no-cost quota covers 1 GiB stored and 50,000 reads a day, and past it you pay per operation — $0.03 per 100,000 reads at the default Iowa rate — with 99.99% to 99.999% uptime by location.

Consider something else if You want SQL, predictable monthly bills or a HIPAA path: Firestore is a document store, costs scale with reads, writes and egress ($0.12 per GiB after 10 GiB), no Firebase page mentions HIPAA or a BAA, and a database's location cannot be changed after it is created.

## iScore

68 / 100 (80% interval 62–73), rank 7 of 14 in databases — interval overlaps the next rank, so this is an ordering, not a finding.

inetGeek's own reading, computed from sourced facts against category peers by disclosed rules. Not a provider claim. Intervals are 80%; a provider with few documented facts is pulled toward the category middle rather than scored on what little is known.
Method: https://inetgeek.com/iscore/. Full output with every criterion's basis: https://inetgeek.com/scores.json. Every databases peer ranked: https://inetgeek.com/databases/firebase/alternatives/

- Price: 69 (58–81), weight 25%, 4 of 6 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: free_expires, minimum_paid_price
- Capacity and limits: 47 (41–53), weight 20%, 3 of 7 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: backup_retention, entry_plan_memory, max_connections, read_replicas
- Capabilities: 75 (69–82), weight 20%, 0 of 5 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: backtrack, branching, connection_pooling, read_replicas, scale_to_zero
- Trust and compliance: 78 (72–84), weight 15%, 10 of 13 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: audit_logs, hipaa_eligible, pci_dss
- Evidence: 90 (90–90), weight 10%, 4 of 4 criteria scored
- Adoption: 53 (8–99), weight 10%, 0 of 1 criteria scored

## What the documentation says

### Pricing

- Free tier: Yes ([source](https://firebase.google.com/pricing), read 2026-09-25)
- Kind of free offer: Free tier ([source](https://firebase.google.com/pricing), read 2026-09-25)
- What the free plan includes: Spark (no-cost) quota for Cloud Firestore: 1 GiB stored data, 50,000 document reads, 20,000 writes and 20,000 deletes a day, and 10 GiB of outbound data transfer a month. Only one database per project gets the free quota; daily quotas reset around midnight Pacific time. TTL deletes, PITR, backups, restores and clones have no free usage. ([source](https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/pricing), read 2026-09-25)
- Credit card to start: No ([source](https://firebase.google.com/pricing), read 2026-09-25)
- Entry paid plan: No plan fee and no stated minimum: Blaze is pay-as-you-go, billed to a linked Cloud Billing account (which requires a payment method) only for usage above the no-cost quotas, which Blaze keeps. Cloud Functions is the stated exception that can charge within quota. Recorded without a magnitude because there is no entry price, only a rate card. ([source](https://firebase.google.com/docs/projects/billing/firebase-pricing-plans), read 2026-09-25)
- Pricing model: Usage-based on the Blaze plan with no plan fee: Firestore charges per document read, write and delete, per index-entry batch read by some queries, per GiB of storage (including metadata and index overhead) and per GiB of network bandwidth. Rates vary by database location, and charges accrue daily. ([source](https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/pricing), read 2026-09-25)
- Egress over allowance: $0.12 per GiB of internet egress to worldwide destinations (excluding China and Australia) between 10 GiB and 1,024 GiB a month, then $0.11 and, above 10,240 GiB, $0.08; the first 10 GiB a month is free. China destinations start at $0.23 per GiB and Australia at $0.19. ([source](https://cloud.google.com/firestore/pricing), read 2026-09-25)

### Limits

- Storage (entry plan): No plan-bundled storage: 1 GiB of Firestore stored data is no-cost on both Spark and Blaze, and Blaze bills anything above it at Google Cloud's per-location rate. ([source](https://firebase.google.com/pricing), read 2026-09-25)

### Infrastructure

- Regions: 43 regional locations across North America, South America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Australia and Africa, plus 3 multi-region locations (eur3 in Europe; nam5 and nam7 in the US). A database's location cannot be changed after it is created. ([source](https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/locations), read 2026-09-25)
- Uptime SLA: 99.999% monthly uptime for multi-region locations and 99.99% for regional locations. ([source](https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/locations), read 2026-09-25)

### Data

- Engine: Cloud Firestore, a NoSQL document database: key-value documents organised into collections and subcollections, with no tables or rows. Not SQL. ([source](https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/data-model), read 2026-09-25)
- Point-in-time recovery: 7 days once point-in-time recovery is enabled; it is off by default and PITR data is billed as storage. Without PITR, documents can still be read at any timestamp within the past hour. ([source](https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/pitr), read 2026-09-25)
- Backup retention: No automatic backups: scheduled backups are a Blaze-plan feature you configure, with up to one daily and one weekly schedule per database and a retention period you set of up to 14 weeks. Backup storage and restores are billed, with no free quota. ([source](https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/backups), read 2026-09-25)

### Support

- Support on entry paid plan: No-cost Firebase support covers account, billing and quota issues, technical questions and bug reports, but not writing or debugging code; faster support, with target response times from 15 minutes, is sold through Google Cloud support. ([source](https://firebase.google.com/support/scope), read 2026-09-25)

### Compliance

- SOC 2: Firestore has completed SOC 1, SOC 2 and SOC 3 evaluations; reports for Firebase services under the Google Cloud terms are requested through the Compliance Reports Manager. ([source](https://firebase.google.com/support/privacy), read 2026-09-25)
- ISO 27001: ISO 27001 certified, like every Firebase service; Firestore also carries ISO 27017 and ISO 27018, with a tick in all six columns of Firebase's compliance table. ([source](https://firebase.google.com/support/privacy), read 2026-09-25)
- GDPR / data residency: Firestore is one of the Firebase services with a data location selection that restricts processing to the chosen location; Google acts as a GDPR data processor under Firebase's Data Processing and Security Terms. ([source](https://firebase.google.com/support/privacy), read 2026-09-25)
- Encryption at rest: All Firestore data at rest is encrypted by default with Google-managed encryption, with no setup required. ([source](https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/cmek), read 2026-09-25)
- Customer-managed keys: CMEK through Cloud KMS exists but sits behind an allowlist: the default quota is 0 CMEK databases per project until an access request is approved. ([source](https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/quotas), read 2026-09-25)
- Role-based access control: Firebase IAM: basic owner/editor/viewer roles, predefined Firebase-, product-category- and product-level roles, and custom roles. ([source](https://firebase.google.com/docs/projects/iam/overview), read 2026-09-25)
- Private networking / VPC: Private Google Access is documented only for Firestore with MongoDB compatibility (Enterprise edition): VMs without external IPs reach Firestore over Google's internal network, MongoDB protocol only. ([source](https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/enterprise/configure-private-google-access), read 2026-09-25)
- Dedicated infrastructure: Not offered: Firebase's FAQ says it does not offer dedicated infrastructure hosting (on-premises installations) and points enterprises to the Blaze plan. ([source](https://firebase.google.com/support/faq), read 2026-09-25)