PocketBase vs AWS Amplify: Features, Pricing and User Reviews 2026

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.

AWS Amplify uses a pay-as-you-go pricing model with a generous free tier for 12 months. Here's how pricing works:

Build and Deploy: You get 1,000 free build minutes monthly (Standard instance). Additional minutes cost $0.01 per minute. Larger instances for complex builds start at $0.025 per minute.

Hosting: Free tier includes 5 GB storage and 15 GB data transfer monthly. Beyond that, storage costs $0.023 per GB monthly, and data transfer is $0.15 per GB served.

Server-Side Rendering: For Next.js and Nuxt apps, you get 500,000 free requests and 100 GB-hours monthly. Additional requests cost $0.30 per million, and compute time is $0.20 per GB-hour.

Backend Services: Individual AWS services like databases (DynamoDB), authentication (Cognito), and storage (S3) have their own pricing and free tiers. Many offer permanent free tiers for small workloads.

Most small to medium projects stay within free tier limits. Larger apps typically cost $10-100 monthly depending on traffic and usage.