PocketBase

What is PocketBase?

PocketBase is an open-source backend that ships as a single Go binary bundling a SQLite database, authentication, file storage, a built-in admin UI, and realtime subscriptions. There's no separate database server or infrastructure to wire up, you download one executable, run it, and you have a working backend with a REST API and an admin dashboard for managing data. It's built for small projects and prototypes where spinning up a full backend stack would be overkill.

Key features

• Single-binary deployment, no separate database or services to install and configure
• SQLite under the hood, fast for small-to-medium workloads and easy to back up as a single file
• Built-in auth (email/password, OAuth2 providers) and file storage out of the box
• Realtime subscriptions for live-updating data without building your own websocket layer
• Admin UI for browsing and editing collections without writing a separate admin panel
• Usable as a Go framework too, if you want to extend it with custom server-side logic

Who it's for

Great for side projects, MVPs, and small apps where a $5 VPS and one binary can handle the whole backend without ongoing maintenance. It's not built for the kind of scale or write concurrency that needs a real distributed database, SQLite's single-writer model becomes a real constraint once traffic grows.

Pricing

Free and open-source, self-hosted. You only pay for whatever server you run it on.