---
title: "Your Supabase project got paused. Here's what to do"
description: "Free Supabase projects get switched off after a quiet week. Your data is intact. Here's how to bring it back and stop it happening again."
url: https://www.fomio.ai/blog/your-supabase-project-got-paused-heres-what-to-do
published: 2026-09-02T18:00:05.963+00:00
updated: 2026-09-02T18:00:05.963+00:00
topic: supabase
words: 1939
---

# Your Supabase project got paused. Here's what to do

Nothing is broken, nothing is lost — the free version of Supabase switches off projects that look unused, and getting yours back is usually one button.

**In short:**

- A paused project is switched off, not deleted — your data and settings are still there.
- Supabase pauses free projects after a quiet week, and "quiet" means nothing touched the database, not that you stopped working.
- Restoring is one button in the dashboard, and it can take far longer than the minute or two the docs suggest.
- A paid Supabase plan removes the problem permanently; everything else is a workaround.

### Why did my Supabase project get paused?

Supabase switches off free projects that show low activity over a seven-day period, to save server resources. Your data and configuration stay intact — the project is just unreachable until you restore it, which is one button in the dashboard. Paid projects are not paused for inactivity at all.

You opened your app this morning and nothing loads. Or a user emailed you. Sign-in spins forever, the list that's meant to show data shows nothing, and somewhere there's a message about a project being paused.

Nothing is broken. Nobody hacked you. Your data is still there.

The screen people land on says roughly: the project is currently paused, all of your project's data is still intact, but your project is inaccessible while paused. That's the whole story in one sentence. The lights are off. The furniture is still inside.

## Why was my project paused when I was still working on it?

"Activity" doesn't mean *you* were busy. Supabase measures requests hitting the database itself, and their docs put the bar low — typically a few user requests to the database each day across the previous week is enough to stay awake.[^1]

So a week where nobody signed in, nobody saved anything, and nobody loaded a page that reads from your tables is a week that counts as zero. This catches people who built with Lovable, Bolt, Replit or v0 more than anyone, because the project was created for them and they never think about it directly.

- The app you built for a client, finished, handed over, and nobody's opened since.
- The side project with real but bursty users — nothing for eight days, then a rush.
- The staging or "test" project you made while learning, forgot about, and which turns out to be the one your live app actually points at.

- **7 days** — The quiet stretch that triggers a pause on the Free Plan, per Supabase's docs (accessed 2026) [^1]
- **1 year** — Window to restore a paused project from the dashboard, per Supabase's docs (accessed 2026) [^1]

Supabase does warn you. The docs say two emails go to the project owner: one roughly a week before the pause takes effect, and one confirming it after.[^1] That first one is easy to miss — it arrives about something that isn't broken yet, from a service you may not remember signing up for.

## How do I restore a paused Supabase project?

Open the paused project in your Supabase dashboard and choose Restore. It comes back in its previous state, data and configuration intact, and Supabase gives you a one-year window from the moment it was paused to do this from inside the dashboard.[^1]

1. **Press Restore** — In the dashboard, open the paused project and choose Restore. That's the whole action.
2. **Give it more than two minutes** — Supabase's own guidance is a minute or two. There are public reports of far longer — a bug report filed on Supabase's GitHub in July 2025 described a Free Plan project stuck resuming well past that,[^4] and a separate discussion from someone who waited over an hour with the dashboard still not connected.[^5] At the twenty-minute mark you are not doing it wrong. Refreshing doesn't help.
3. **Test sign-in first** — When it's back, open your app and log in. That's usually the first thing to break and the last thing anyone checks.
4. **Check the address in your app** — Make sure the project address and keys inside whatever you built with point at the project you just restored, not an old one.

> **Restoring resumes, it doesn't rewind** — If data went missing before the pause, coming out of the pause won't bring it back.

## What if the Restore button is greyed out?

Past the restore limit, you can't bring the project back through the dashboard at all. Supabase's troubleshooting docs describe the alternative: download what's available from the Project Overview screen — the database backup file plus everything in your storage buckets — create a fresh project, and load it in.[^2]

Two honest warnings. It is a real technical job, with command-line tools, connection strings, and error messages you're meant to ignore mixed in with ones you aren't. And one community discussion notes the old project's unique web address is released when this happens[^3] — which matters, because that address is very likely sitting in your app's settings.

Note that the published limit has moved. The current docs describe a one-year window; older threads and a troubleshooting article refer to ninety days. Trust your dashboard over any number written down, including this one.

## How do I stop my Supabase project pausing again?

There are three approaches and they are not equal. Paying for the project is the only one that removes the problem — projects on a paid plan aren't subject to automatic pausing for inactivity.[^1]

The second is simply opening the project in the dashboard. Supabase says that generates activity. It works, it costs nothing, and it depends on you remembering every week forever, including the week you're on holiday.

The third is having something load your app on a schedule. That comes with a catch most articles skip: it only counts if the thing being loaded actually reads from your database. A guide published on Medium in December 2025 makes the point directly — just visiting your URL isn't necessarily enough.[^8] If your home page is static and the database only wakes after someone signs in, an automated visit proves nothing. Point it at a page that loads real data.

## Which tool should watch my app for me?

UptimeRobot, Better Stack, Pingdom and Uptime Kuma all do the same core job: load a web address on a schedule and shout if it doesn't come back. Better Stack and Pingdom are genuinely more powerful — more locations around the world to check from, deeper history, richer reporting. If you want to know your app's response time in Sydney versus São Paulo, use them.

What they have in common is who they were built for. They ask how often to check, which server replies count as failure, and where alerts should be routed. That's fine if those words mean something to you. If they don't, you're configuring a monitoring system before you can find out whether your app is up.

*Tools that watch a web address on a schedule*

| Tool | What it asks you for | What it tells you | Best for |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| UptimeRobot | How often to check, what counts as a failure | Up or down, with technical detail | People comfortable with monitoring settings |
| Better Stack / Pingdom | The same, plus alert routing and reporting choices | Detailed performance data from many countries | Teams who need depth and long history |
| Uptime Kuma | A server you run and maintain yourself | Up or down, on your own dashboard | People who want free and open source and don't mind hosting |
| Fomio | A link. Nothing to configure. | Working, Having trouble or Down — plus what likely went wrong, in plain English | People who built an app with an AI tool and don't want to learn a monitoring product |

Fomio, which we make, was built for that last reader. You paste a link and it works out what to watch. When something breaks it tells you in plain English what likely went wrong — and on the paid plans it writes the prompt to paste straight into the tool you built with, so you're not translating a problem you don't have words for into a fix you can't describe.

Where the others beat us, plainly: they check from more places, they keep longer histories, and several have features we don't have. If you need those, take them.

For this problem, the relevant differences are these. The free plan watches one app from outside, checks every five minutes, emails you when it breaks and keeps a week of event history — no card needed. Builder watches three apps, checks every minute, keeps thirty days and includes the fix prompts. Pro watches fifteen, keeps a year of history, and gives your users a status page to check instead of emailing you. Current prices are at fomio.ai/pricing.

> **Be straight about this** — No outside watcher is a guaranteed way to keep a free Supabase project awake — whether the checks count as activity depends on whether the page being loaded touches your database. Treat any of these tools as the thing that tells you fast when your app stops working, including the morning it's paused, not as a loophole.

**Paste this into your AI tool**

```text
Add a page at /health that reads one row from a real table in our Supabase database and returns a short plain-text response. It should fail visibly if the database is unreachable. Do not require login for this page, and do not expose any user data in the response.
```

## What should I do today?

Restore the project, give it more than two minutes, then log in to your own app to confirm sign-in works. After that, check the project address in your app's settings matches the project you just restored.

Then decide honestly whether this app has users who'd notice a week of downtime. If it does, a paid Supabase plan removes this entire category of problem permanently. And if what actually stung was not the pause but the four days before anyone told you, that's the part worth fixing next.

## Questions people also ask


### Is my data deleted when a Supabase project is paused?

No. The pause screen says it directly: all of your project's data is still intact, but the project is inaccessible while paused. Restoring brings it back in its previous state, with configuration included. The one thing restoring does not do is recover anything that went missing before the pause — resuming is not the same as rolling back to an earlier version of your database.

### How long does restoring take?

Supabase's guidance is a minute or two, and often that's what happens. But there are public reports of much longer waits — a bug report on Supabase's GitHub in July 2025 described a Free Plan project stuck resuming well past that, and another discussion came from someone still not connected after an hour. If you're twenty minutes in, wait. Refreshing the dashboard does not speed it up.

### Will visiting my website keep the project awake?

Only if the page being visited actually reads from the database. Supabase counts requests to the database, so a static landing page that fetches nothing contributes nothing. A guide published on Medium in December 2025 makes exactly this point. If you want scheduled visits to count, point them at a page that loads real data, or add a small page that reads one row and returns a plain response.

### Why didn't I get a warning email?

You probably did. Supabase's docs say two emails go to the project owner: one about a week before the pause, one after. The problem is who the owner is. If an AI building tool created the project for you, the address on file may be one you rarely check, and the first email arrives about something that isn't broken yet. Spam folders collect a lot of these.

### Does paying for Supabase stop this completely?

Yes, for this specific problem. Supabase's docs are clear that projects on a paid plan aren't paused for inactivity. Everything else on this page — opening the dashboard weekly, having something load your app on a schedule — is a workaround for a free project. If real people depend on the app, paying removes the whole category of problem rather than managing it.


## Sources

[^1]: Project Pausing — Supabase Docs. https://supabase.com/docs/guides/platform/free-project-pausing
[^2]: How To Restore a Project Paused for More Than 1 Year — Supabase Docs (Troubleshooting). https://supabase.com/docs/guides/troubleshooting/restore-project-after-90-days-pause
[^3]: How To Restore Project After 90-Day Pause — GitHub Discussion #44734 — supabase on GitHub. https://github.com/orgs/supabase/discussions/44734
[^4]: resuming project taking a long time — Issue #37453 — supabase/supabase on GitHub (2025-07-25). https://github.com/supabase/supabase/issues/37453
[^5]: My Supabase Project is not Resuming after Pause — Discussion #38950 — supabase on GitHub. https://github.com/orgs/supabase/discussions/38950
[^6]: The project is currently paused — Discussion #41710 — supabase on GitHub. https://github.com/orgs/supabase/discussions/41710
[^7]: My project has currently paused i want to restore my project — Discussion #33936 — supabase on GitHub. https://github.com/orgs/supabase/discussions/33936
[^8]: Prevent Supabase Free Tier Pausing — Shadhujan, Medium (2025-12-31). https://shadhujan.medium.com/how-to-keep-supabase-free-tier-projects-active-d60fd4a17263
[^9]: Recovering a Paused or Deleted Supabase Project — SimpleBackups (2026-06-15). https://simplebackups.com/blog/recover-paused-supabase-project
[^10]: Supabase Free Tier Paused and Lost Data: What Happened — SimpleBackups (2026-04-14). https://simplebackups.com/blog/supabase-free-tier-paused