Supabase Storage Alternative

Supabase Storage is the object-storage piece of the Supabase BaaS, sitting alongside its Postgres database, Auth, and Realtime. For app files tied to your data model it is convenient — same project, same Row Level Security policies, same client. But it is also where bills and quotas get tight as media grows. The free tier gives 1 GB of file storage and 5 GB of egress; the Pro plan ($25/month) includes 100 GB storage and 250 GB egress, after which storage is roughly $0.021/GB and egress $0.09/GB.

When you start serving videos, high-res images, or large downloads to real traffic, egress is the line item that climbs fastest, and it competes for the same project budget as your database. The angle here is narrow on purpose: you do not have to leave Supabase. Keep Postgres, Auth, RLS, Realtime, and Edge Functions exactly as they are — just move the heavy, frequently served binaries off Storage so they stop driving Supabase egress and quota.

Store a files.link URL in a Postgres column instead of a Supabase Storage path, and serve the bytes from a global CDN that is not metered against your Supabase plan. Uploading is three HTTP calls with your raw API key in the Authorization header: POST /v1/files/{folderId} returns a presigned URL, PUT the bytes, POST /v1/files/confirm-upload returns a permanent CDN URL.

From a Supabase Edge Function or your backend you run those three calls and then a single insert/update to keep the relationship in Postgres — your data model is unchanged, only the file's home moved. Migration is incremental and low-risk because the two systems coexist: list a bucket with the Supabase client (supabase.storage.from(bucket).list()), download each object, push it through the three-call upload, and write the new URL back to the row.

New uploads point at files.link; old ones backfill in the background; nothing about your auth or queries changes. Honest caveats: files.link is not part of Supabase, so there are no Storage RLS policies — access control is the public/private flag plus signed URLs (10-minute expiry) your backend mints, and authorization decisions live in your app code. If your files must be governed by the same RLS rows as your tables, Supabase Storage stays the tighter fit.

For dodging egress and storage quota on media-heavy workloads while keeping everything else Supabase, this is the targeted move.