Supabase project paused — how to restore it and stop it happening again

Your app worked last week. Today logins fail, lists are empty, and the console is full of failed requests to supabase.co. Nothing in your code changed.

There's a good chance Supabase paused your project.

This is normal behavior on Supabase's Free plan, not a bug and not a punishment. But it catches a lot of people out, especially with apps built in Lovable or Bolt where Supabase runs quietly in the background and you never open its dashboard. This guide explains what's going on, how to bring the project back, and how to keep it from happening again.

What "paused" means

Supabase's documentation says it pauses projects on the Free plan that have low activity over a 7-day period, to save server resources. Projects on paid plans are not paused for inactivity.

While a project is paused:

• Its database, authentication, storage and edge functions don't answer requests.
• Your data is not deleted. It's kept, and comes back when you restore the project.
• Your website itself usually still loads, because it's hosted somewhere else (Lovable, Vercel, Netlify, Bolt hosting). It just can't reach its backend.

That last point is why paused projects are so confusing. Your site "is up" — the page opens — but sign-in doesn't work, data doesn't load, and forms fail. Depending on how the app was written, you might see empty lists, endless spinners, a "Failed to fetch" error, or a completely blank white screen.

How to tell it's a pause and not something else

1. Open the Supabase dashboard and find the project. A paused project is clearly marked as paused, with an option to restore it.
2. If you have several projects and aren't sure which one your app uses, look at your app's settings: the Supabase address looks like https://<project-ref>.supabase.co. The part before .supabase.co is the project reference, and you'll see the same reference in the dashboard URL when you open the project.
3. Check that Supabase itself is fine on our Supabase status page. If Supabase is having an outage, every project is affected, paused or not — and restoring won't help until it's over.

Also search your inbox for an email from Supabase about the project. If you signed up with an address you rarely check, a notice about the pause is easy to miss.

How to restore a paused project

1. Sign in to the Supabase dashboard with the account that owns the project.
2. Open the paused project.
3. Click Restore project (the wording may vary slightly, but the option is shown prominently on paused projects).
4. Wait. Restoring takes a few minutes; the dashboard shows the progress. Don't start it twice.
5. When the project is active again, open your app and try the things that were broken: sign in, load a page with data, submit a form.

You don't need to change any keys or settings. The project keeps its address and keys, so your app reconnects by itself.

If the restore button isn't there

Paused Free projects can only be restored within a limited window. Supabase's changelog from 2024 announced that paused Free plan projects are restorable for 90 days after they're paused. After that, the dashboard offers to download the latest backup of your database and your storage files instead of restoring. Check your project in the dashboard for the current rule, since Supabase may change it.

If you're past that window, you can create a new project, load the backup into it, and update your app with the new project's address and key. That's more work, so it's worth catching a pause early.

If you can't restore because of the free project limit

Supabase's billing FAQ says you can have two active Free projects, and paused projects don't count towards that limit. If you already have two active Free projects, restoring a third one won't fit. You can pause one of the others, delete one you don't need, or upgrade the organization to a paid plan.

Why it happened to your project

"Low activity over 7 days" usually means one of these:

• It's a side project or a demo. Nobody used it for a week, so the database got no requests.
• It's not launched yet. You built it, showed it to a few people, and moved on to something else for a while.
• Your site is visited, but doesn't touch the database. A landing page that loads without any Supabase call doesn't count as database activity, even if people visit it daily.

Supabase doesn't publish an exact threshold for what counts as enough activity, so don't build anything that depends on a precise number.

How to stop it from happening again

Option 1: Upgrade to a paid plan

This is the only option Supabase guarantees. Projects on paid plans aren't paused for inactivity. If the app is a real product with real users — or you're about to launch — this is the honest answer. Check Supabase's pricing page for the current price.

Option 2: Keep the project genuinely in use

If the app has real users, the problem often solves itself once people use it daily. For a project you're actively building, opening the app and using it at least every few days also counts.

Some people set up a scheduled job that calls the database regularly to keep the project "active". That can work, but understand what you're doing: you're working around a Free plan rule, Supabase doesn't promise how much activity is enough, and the rule can change. Don't rely on it for anything important.

Option 3: Accept the pause, but hear about it immediately

For side projects, demos and apps that are allowed to sleep, the pause itself isn't the problem. The problem is finding out a week later from a user — or never.

Pingbuddy checks whether the Supabase project your app talks to is paused. When it finds one, you get an alert on Telegram or by email that says "Your Supabase project is paused — your app is broken" with a direct link to restore it, and another message when it's running again. It works on the Free plan; you just add your site's address, and Pingbuddy finds the Supabase project from your app's code.

You can also run a free checkup on your app right now. One of the things it looks at is whether the app's Supabase project is paused.

After restoring: a quick check

A restore brings everything back as it was, but it's worth spending two minutes confirming:

• Sign in works. Log out and back in with a test account.
• Data loads. Open the main screens that read from the database.
• Writes work. Submit a form or create something, then check it appears.
• Scheduled jobs and webhooks ran? Anything that was supposed to happen while the project was paused (a nightly job, a Stripe webhook) didn't. Stripe retries failed webhook deliveries for a while, but check your Stripe dashboard for failed events if you take payments.
• Emails from Supabase Auth. Password reset and confirmation emails sent while the project was paused never went out. Users may need to request them again.

Quick summary

• Free plan projects with low activity over 7 days get paused. Data is kept.
• Your site usually still opens, but sign-in and data don't work.
• Restore it from the Supabase dashboard: open the project, click restore, wait a few minutes.
• Restore is only possible for a limited time after the pause; after that you get a backup to download.
• Two active Free projects per account; paused ones don't count.
• To prevent it: a paid plan (guaranteed), real daily use, or at least an alert the moment it happens.