Firebase Remote Config Ends Its Free-Forever Era

Firebase Remote Config stopped being unlimited and free on September 1, 2026. Every project now gets 100,000 fetch requests a day at no cost; on Blaze, pay-as-you-go plans, anything past that costs $0.06 per 10,000 requests up to 10 million a day, then $0.01 per 10,000 beyond that (Pricing for Remote Config, Firebase docs).

The number that matters

100,000 fetches a day sounds generous until an app checks a feature flag on every cold start, screen transition or session refresh, the exact pattern Remote Config was built to support. An app with 50,000 daily active users making two fetches each clears the free tier before lunch. Firebase engineer Frank van Puffelen confirmed the same free-then-metered numbers on X, matching what’s now in Firebase’s own docs (@puf).

Spark, Firebase’s free plan, isn’t cut off cold. Projects that already had Remote Config enabled before September 1 keep unmetered access through December 1, 2026, or February 1, 2027 if they upgrade to Blaze before November 15. New Spark projects get the standard 100,000-a-day cap immediately, and Firebase’s docs note a first-overage grace period of 30 days before throttling kicks in.

The feature bundled in with the bill

The pricing change didn’t ship alone. Firebase also folded A/B Testing directly into the Remote Config template lifecycle: experiments are now created from the Remote Config console, staged and versioned alongside parameter changes, and published atomically with the rest of a template instead of living in a separate Drafts tab. That old standalone tab is being removed October 31, 2026.

Firestore Enterprise pipelines and Phone Number Verification both shipped GA with their own dedicated firebase.blog posts earlier this year. Remote Config’s pricing shift got no such treatment: it reached developers through the pricing docs page and van Puffelen’s own summary on X, not a standalone announcement.

Firerun’s take

Nothing about the free tier’s ceiling is unreasonable in isolation. 100,000 requests a day is still enough for most side projects and early-stage apps, and folding A/B Testing into the template lifecycle is a real simplification, not a rebrand. The problem is what Remote Config has quietly become: not a config toggle checked once per session, but the plumbing under feature flags, kill switches and personalization that fire on every screen. Teams that adopted it for that reason, on Spark, are the ones who’ll feel this first.

If Remote Config sits on your app’s hot path, audit fetch frequency now, not in November. The Firebase SDKs cache config locally and support a configurable minimum fetch interval. Tightening it from “every screen” to “once per session” is the fastest way to stay under 100,000 a day without losing the feature. Spark projects that are already over the cap have until December to make that change before the invoice starts.