Firestore pricing clarifications for offline cached data

According to this If you want to work completely offline with Cloud Firestore you can disable network by :

FirebaseFirestore.getInstance().disableNetwork()

but firestore will cause client offline error for first user get request, that you must consider this error as empty response.


As the offical documentation says,

Cloud Firestore supports offline data persistence. This feature caches a copy of the Cloud Firestore data that your app is actively using, so your app can access the data when the device is offline. You can write, read, listen to, and query the cached data. When the device comes back online, Cloud Firestore synchronizes any local changes made by your app to the data stored remotely in Cloud Firestore.

So, every client that is using a Firestore database and sets PersistenceEnabled to true, maintains it's own internal (local) version of the database. When data is inserted/updated, it is first written to this local version of the database. As a result, all writes to the database are added to a queue. This means that all the operations that where stored there will be commited on Firebase servers once you are back online. This also means that those operations will be seen as independent operations and not as a whole.

But remeber, don't use Firestore as an offline-only database. It is really designed as an online database that came work for short to intermediate periods of being disconnected. While offline it will keep queue of write operations. As this queue grows, local operations and app startup will slow down. Nothing major, but over time these may add up.

If Google Cloud Firestore priceing model does not fit your use case very well then use Firebase Realtime Database. As mentioned also in this post from the Firebase offical blog, one the reasons you still might want to use the Realtime Database is:

As we noted above, Cloud Firestore's pricing model means that applications that perform very large numbers of small reads and writes per second per client could be significantly more expensive than a similarly performing app in the Realtime Database.

So it's up to you which option you choose.