Is your Supabase project paused?
Paste your project ref or URL and get the answer in one second. We send a single request to your project's API gateway — a paused project answers HTTP 540, an awake one answers normally. No API keys, nothing stored.
Why Supabase pauses free projects
Supabase pauses Free-tier projects after roughly seven days without activity — no database queries, no API traffic. It's how the free tier stays free.
The frustrating part is the timing: side projects are quiet by nature, so the pause usually lands right when you stopped watching, and you find out weeks later when a demo link is dead or the app greets a user with an error.
A paused project isn't a lost project. The database is frozen, not deleted — but every request to it fails with HTTP 540 until you restore it.
How to restore a paused project
- Log in to the Supabase dashboard and select the paused project.
- Click Restore project and confirm. It typically comes back within a few minutes, data intact.
- Check the clock: after 90 days paused, one-click restore is disabled and you're into download-the-backup territory. Long enough after that, the project is removed entirely.
How to stop it pausing again
Two real options. Upgrade to Pro — paid projects never pause — or give the project a heartbeat of genuine activity: a scheduled job (a GitHub Action is the usual choice) that runs a small query every day or two.
The trap with keep-alive jobs is that they fail silently. GitHub disables scheduled workflows after 60 days of repo inactivity.
Tokens expire. Someone renames a table.
The job stops, nothing tells you, and three weeks later the project pauses anyway — you're back to finding out from a dead demo link.
Know the moment it pauses — not three weeks later.
Join Tell Me When Down free and we'll watch your Supabase project around the clock — the moment it stops answering, you get an email.
Supabase pausing, answered
Why was my Supabase project paused?
Supabase pauses Free-tier projects after about a week without activity to save resources.
It looks at real usage — database queries and API traffic — so a project that nothing has talked to for seven days gets paused, even if you were planning to come back to it.
Paid (Pro) projects are never paused.
How do I check if my Supabase project is paused?
Two ways: log in to the Supabase dashboard and look at the project's status, or use the checker on this page — a paused project's API gateway answers every request with HTTP 540, Supabase's official “project paused” status code, so one request to your project URL gives you the answer without logging in.
What happens when a Supabase project is paused?
Everything served by the project stops: database, auth, storage, and edge functions all answer HTTP 540 instead of working.
Your data is not deleted — the database volume is frozen in place. Any app pointing at the project starts erroring, which is usually how people find out.
How do I unpause a Supabase project?
Open the Supabase dashboard, select the paused project, and click Restore. It comes back with all data intact, usually within a few minutes.
There's no way to unpause via the API from outside — the dashboard is the path.
Can I restore a Supabase project paused more than 90 days ago?
Not with one click. After 90 days paused, the Restore button is disabled; you can download your backup from the dashboard and restore it into a new project manually.
After long enough, the project and its infrastructure are removed entirely — so restore well before the 90-day mark.
How do I keep my Supabase project from pausing?
Either upgrade to Pro (paid projects don't pause) or give the project regular activity — most people run a scheduled job, like a GitHub Action, that queries the database every day or two.
The catch: keep-alive jobs fail silently. GitHub disables scheduled workflows in repos with no activity for 60 days, and an expired token stops one just as quietly.
Monitoring the project — or the job itself — is how you find out before Supabase does.
Related reading
Other free checks
one request to your project's gateway · nothing stored · not affiliated with Supabase