What happens when a Supabase project is paused
Supabase pauses Free plan projects that receive too little database activity over a week. A paused project keeps its data, but the database, API and Storage stop answering until the project is restored. Paid projects are not paused for inactivity.
Restore a paused project
- Open the project in the Supabase dashboard and restore it from the project page.
- When the project is healthy again, test a login and a representative query before sending traffic to it.
- Check extensions and client tooling. Free projects move to the latest minor version when a paused project is restored, according to the Supabase upgrading guide.
The rules for when a project counts as inactive are in the Supabase project pausing documentation.
How long you can wait
The current Supabase documentation gives a paused project one year in which it can be restored from the dashboard. Older answers mention 90 days, the limit Supabase announced in June 2024.
After that, the project can no longer be restored through the dashboard. The Supabase guide for that case downloads the database backup and Storage objects from the Project Overview, creates a new project, restores the database with psql, uploads the Storage objects with the CLI and copies configuration through the Management API.
That route depends on those downloads. A deleted project has none: Supabase cannot recover a deleted project. Do not delete a paused project before you have what you need from it.
What a pause costs you
- Your app is down until someone restores the project. Users get errors, not a maintenance page.
- Any scheduled job that connects to the project, including a backup, fails while it is paused.
- After the restore window, recovery is a manual migration into a new project, with new API keys and a new project URL.
Keep a project from pausing
A paid plan is the only documented way to keep a project from being paused. According to Supabase, a few user requests to the database each day are usually enough. Some people schedule a small query to keep a project awake. That works until Supabase changes what counts as activity.
Keep a copy outside the project
Everything above happens inside the paused project. If you already have a copy somewhere else, you can restore that instead of waiting. ReviveDB backs up the database and Auth, Storage files, Edge Function code and deploy metadata, along with Storage bucket settings, and stores each recovery point in the EU. While a project is paused, its scheduled backup fails and you receive an email; the recovery points already stored remain outside the project.
A recovery point can go into a new, empty Supabase project. The steps are in how to restore a Supabase backup to a new project. For the options on the Free plan, see how to back up Supabase on the free plan.