Supabase PITR vs BackupDrill — cost and what each actually protects

These are different tools that get compared because they share a budget line. Point-in-Time Recovery is genuinely better at one thing — recovery granularity — and does not attempt several others. Here is the honest version, prices as of August 2026. If you are still working out what PITR is and what it costs before comparing anything, start with the PITR explainer — how WAL archiving works, the retention tiers, and how to turn it off.

Side by side

Choose PITR if

• You need minute-level RPO. A high-write production database where losing even an hour is unacceptable needs second-level recovery points, and scheduled snapshots — ours or anyone’s — cannot deliver that.
• Compliance explicitly requires point-in-time recovery. Auditors ask for the capability by name; a snapshot schedule is not the same checkbox.
• The $100/month per project fits your budget and your data lives entirely in Postgres — no Storage files worth protecting.

Choose BackupDrill if

• You can tolerate snapshot-interval RPO — for most apps, losing a few hours in a worst case is survivable; losing Storage files or a backup that will not restore is not.
• Storage files matter. Neither PITR nor the built-in backups touch them — a database-only restore brings back storage.objects metadata pointing at files that may no longer exist. We back up the files themselves — once you add the project’s Storage S3 keys — together with the database.
• You want copies off Supabase, in a bucket you own — your account, your retention, portable archives that restore with stock pg_restore (see restore & recovery).
• You want proof, not hope. On your plan’s cadence (weekly on every paid plan), a drill restores the latest snapshot into a throwaway Postgres — archive checksummed, table count verified against the manifest, populated tables confirmed non-empty — and failures are emailed.
• You run several projects. Every paid plan covers multiple projects — 5 on Solo, 20 on Team, 100 on Agency; PITR is priced per project, so three projects is $300/month.

Running both is a valid answer

For a serious production app the strongest setup is PITR for recovery granularity plus BackupDrill for ownership, Storage files, and verified restores. They protect against different failures: PITR against fat-fingered writes ten minutes ago, BackupDrill against the backup itself being broken, files silently unprotected, or needing your data outside Supabase. Start with the quickstart — the free plan covers one project — or see the wider picture in every Supabase backup option compared. For the incident playbook itself — which failures each backup type can save you from, and the steps when one hits — see the disaster recovery runbook.

FAQ