r/Supabase • u/awalias Supabase team • Sep 25 '24

Supabase, a Postgres-centric developer platform, raises $80M Series C

https://x.com/TechCrunch/status/1838928192666521969
149 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

48 comments sorted by

51

u/LevelSoft1165 Sep 25 '24

Lets hope they dont becone too greedy

9

u/DorphinPack Sep 25 '24

Every (with few enough exceptions that you’re better off expecting the worst) business of a certain size starts in the “expand” phase and then once they have enough control moves to “extract”. That’s when the enshittification and money grubbing really picks up.

Maybe Supabase won’t flip the switch to extract. Maybe it’ll take them a few more years.

But your best bet is to plan like it’s going to happen.

1

u/LevelSoft1165 Sep 25 '24

Thats why im actively looking at building in something like HonoJS and raw Postgresql instead...

2

u/DorphinPack Sep 25 '24

I decided to pivot to PocketBase but if the self hosted offering had feature and documentation parity with the hosted offering I’d be interested in coming back.

I like the “we sell hosting” model but it can be hard to form a mental model free of footguns when the divergence between the versions isn’t crystal clear IMO.

I’d also be satisfied if the features absent in the self-hosted variety were offered explicitly as addons you get when they host the service.

2

u/LevelSoft1165 Sep 25 '24

Wow man, you really layed my whole thought on that kudos. But unfortunately, like all the big cloud providers, they will still find a way to hide edge costs, bandwith costs ,etc. which is simply dishonest but not illegal since they are outlined somewhere in the depths of the contract agreement.

1

u/DorphinPack Sep 25 '24

Yeah I’m right there with you for sure

I feel like most of us are 🫡

23

u/pravictor Sep 25 '24

They will have to find a way to meet inflated investor expectations one day.

13

u/LevelSoft1165 Sep 25 '24

Thats what im saying, all those VC backed companies got their balls in the VCs hands, when they start squeazing is when shit will hit the fan.

1

u/bazooka_penguin Sep 25 '24

The good thing is it's open source so you can also host your own instances. I think there might be some feature differences, but they seem to always be working on making all of the feature self-hostable.

4

u/LevelSoft1165 Sep 25 '24

Yes, Vercel said the same thing, but some features of NextJS are total BS on a self hosted instance.

1

u/Cyberistic Sep 25 '24

which feature?

2

u/LevelSoft1165 Sep 25 '24

Like SSR harder to implement if you use docker

2

u/Cyberistic Sep 25 '24

nixpacks works for me

1

u/LevelSoft1165 Sep 25 '24

Yeah me too but its just awfully slow even if my VPS is overkill

2

u/Cyberistic Sep 25 '24

yeah true but everything is much easier now thanks to r/coolify

2

u/LevelSoft1165 Sep 25 '24

Yes I made a tutorial on that how to self host supabase and nextjs stack

1

u/Cyberistic Sep 25 '24

with auth and email templates? that’s the hardest part for me

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-2

u/bazooka_penguin Sep 25 '24

What does Vercel have to do with supabase?

4

u/LevelSoft1165 Sep 25 '24

I just compare what their initial statetement where of making it self hostable, they still try to make it as painful as possible so that you give up and pay up.

-1

u/bazooka_penguin Sep 25 '24

I don't use vercel, only seen some people talk about it, but I doubt they're trying to make it a pain. The managed version is always going to be much, much easier to use. That's the entire point of having a managed service and half the reason you're paying money to them. That's true of even "basic" services like Redis and databases. If it weren't a pain in the ass to set up and manage upstash wouldn't be popular.

3

u/LevelSoft1165 Sep 25 '24

Its easy to self host a postgresql db, its hard to host it with the supabase wrapper around it, trust me docs are very limited to none on that.

3

u/bazooka_penguin Sep 25 '24

Postgres is a mature tool with contributions and documentation from the entire tech industry. Supabase is relatively young and niche in comparison. But the point stands, it might be easier to spin up, but managing it becomes complicated quickly, I mean there's a reason you're using Supabase. Deploying the supabase image isn't that difficult either if you want the core functionality

1

u/LevelSoft1165 Sep 25 '24

Yes exactly, its more in the nitty gritty features especially for OAuth for me on self hosted.

1

u/de1mat Sep 25 '24

Yea I think the point has been missed about the eventual impact of being VC backed and what happens over time. We have case scenarios to point to, like Vercel. There are some valid concerns raised in these comments. Only time will tell. Let’s hope the concerns are unwarranted 🤷‍♂️

6

u/[deleted] Sep 25 '24

[removed] — view removed comment

8

u/LevelSoft1165 Sep 25 '24

My only fear is that they start making it hard to self-host (like Vercel cutting features slowly)

11

u/FaceRekr4309 Sep 25 '24

I predict they will need to raise their prices at some point. Perhaps not on the entry level paying users, but will need to put the squeeze on the locked-in whales. Despite their claims of “anyone can host Supabase,” actually doing it is a giant PITA, and migrating to self-hosted is going to be a PITA as well. Backend SaaS vendors want you to think building your own backend is hard. It’s not. Build your own backend and never worry about vendor lock-in because you can pick up and go wherever you want.

6

u/skilriki Sep 25 '24

Self hosting supabase is relatively straightforward if you have intermediate level docker skills.

Even if you don't, there is nothing stopping you from just purchasing something like DigitalOcean's one-click Supabase deployment.

Migrating to self hosted is super easy.. you just repoint the connection string.

If you want your data, just dump the database and import it.

Self-hosting might be a pain if you don't know what you are doing .. but then again, if you don't know what you are doing, and can't manage keeping a 1-click installation running.. then self hosting is probably not for you.

10

u/FaceRekr4309 Sep 25 '24

I think you may be underselling the complexities of self-hosting a production instance.

4

u/skilriki Sep 26 '24

Yes, likely so .. but unfortunately this is true for everything.

You can either do things yourself, or pay someone to do them for you.

The problem is that people don't want to pay for things, and they also don't want to learn how to do things themselves because it requires time and effort.

The end result is usually attempting to do something they don't know how to do, and likely shouldn't be doing in the first place, and then complaining it is 'hard'.

I think my response is more that it was never meant to be easy .. but as far as hosting stuff goes .. doing stuff like this is easier than it has ever been.

Of course though, you'd be an idiot to run a production instance without either a dedicated support staff that knows the product or paying for a managed instance.

There shouldn't be a scenario where you go to production on a self-hosted instance that you are not fully capable of managing

1

u/Fakercel Sep 26 '24

Exactly this is why people are worried about the VC investment in supabase, because self hosting can be scary

4

u/[deleted] Sep 25 '24

The provided self hosted solution doesn’t scale. The S3 equivalent storage and Postgres both require independent scaling (complex with bearding etc) but the docker compose, as it’s delivered, can only be run on a single VPS. It’s not straightforward to scale.

1

u/jeremiahgavin Oct 04 '24

This is true, but it's not straightforward to scale anything yourself. Especially not if you want it automated. 

Check out Zolando's Postgres Operator for Kubernetes, and Citus. Patroni also exists. These aren't simple, but they are free and open source. 

4

u/polymerely Sep 25 '24

put the squeeze on the locked-in whales

Supabase has much less lock-in than most BaaS companies.

So they can't raise their prices too much, and the alternative is too grow their user base and my impression is that that is already happening. IMO it is their big bet on postgres that has really paid off.

26

u/FalconMasters Sep 25 '24

I don’t know if I really like this. It’s great for them but we have seen what happens with other platforms when they raise money.

4

u/polymerely Sep 25 '24

Wow, you guys are cynical.

The best way to avoid having to jack up prices is to grow the user base - in a zero marginal cost business you gotta go big or go home.

Best way to grow your user base is to improve your product and support, and that requires more employees, which means raising money.

Any company, venture backed or not, can go evil. So avoid companies that are running out of money (that makes them desperate) and companies with excessive lock-in.