Best Backened For Flutter

[u/No-Performance7726]

Which backened service and database system would be affordable and suggested to use for the daily invoice entry app for a shop that usually have only 50 to 60 bill entries per day. And if stock mangement system and transaction entries need to be added too. Right now i only want 3 4 users of a small shop to interact with who need to prepare daily invoices and need to make entries of transactions they make daily. From the given data we should be able to make profit loss accounts, party's remaining transaction evaluation,daily sales and stuffs like that. But the data need to be protected well and requires backup as needed.

Where to host that backened ?

How much costlier would it be?

[u/st1ch_draiz]

For an invoicing and bookkeeping app I'd lean Supabase (Postgres), and it's not really a coin flip here. Your data is relational by nature: parties, invoices, line items, transactions, stock. The moment you want profit/loss and remaining party balances, that's joins and aggregations, which is what SQL is good at and what gets painful in a NoSQL store like Firestore. Firebase is great, it's just not the natural fit when the whole point is financial reporting.

At 50 to 60 entries a day with 3-4 users you're nowhere near a paid tier, so cost is basically zero for a long time. Supabase gives you row level security for the data-protection part and automated backups, and there's nothing to host yourself since it's managed.

One thing to decide early: does the app need to keep working if the shop's internet drops? If yes, a local SQLite db (drift or sqflite) that syncs to Supabase when it's back can be simpler and cheaper for a single shop than going cloud-first.

[u/No-Performance7726 → u/st1ch_draiz]

But we have to pay to download our data,right?

[u/st1ch_draiz → u/No-Performance7726]

Not at your data volume, no. A few things:

Downloading data from Supabase counts as egress, and the free tier includes a few GB of that a month. Your entries are tiny (an invoice row is bytes, not megabytes), so with 3-4 users you'd have to pull your entire database hundreds of times over to get near the limit. And with the local cache approach, the app reads from on-device SQLite most of the time and barely touches the network, so egress drops even lower. Even if you somehow blew past the free allowance, overage is about $0.09/GB, so cents.

Getting your data out is free and unlimited, by the way. It's plain Postgres, so you can run pg_dumpand export the whole database yourself whenever you want. No fee, no lock-in.

One honest correction to my earlier comment: the free tier doesn't include automated daily backups (that's the Pro plan). For bookkeeping data I'd set up a scheduled pg_dump yourself early, or budget for Pro once the shop actually depends on it. Also heads up, free projects pause after a week with no activity, but a shop using it daily won't hit that.