Juno vs PocketBase: Features, Pricing and User Reviews 2026

Juno offers a simple and transparent pricing model that grows with your needs. The platform is free to get started, making it perfect for developers who want to try building on blockchain.

Free Tier: New developers receive credits to create one mission control container and one project container. This gives you everything needed to build and test your first application at no cost.

Pay as You Grow: Creating additional projects costs 0.4 ICP per container (approximately $4). This one-time fee gives you a new smart contract container for another application.

Operating Costs: Your apps consume "cycles" (the Internet Computer's computation currency) based on usage. Storage costs approximately $5 per gigabyte per year. Deploying a typical website with hundreds of files costs around $0.15.

You can top up cycles using ICP from your wallet, credit card through Stripe, or transfer cycles between your containers. Pricing is based entirely on actual resource usage, so you only pay for what you consume.

PocketBase is completely free and open source under the MIT License. There are no subscription fees, usage limits, or hidden costs. You can download it, use it for any project, and even offer it as a paid service to your clients.

Since it is self-hosted, your only costs are server expenses if you deploy it online. You can run it on a small VPS server for just a few dollars per month, or even on free hosting platforms. For development and testing, it runs perfectly on your local computer at no cost.

The free license also means you can modify the source code to fit your specific needs. There are no enterprise plans or paid tiers because everything is included in the free version.