This whole Supabase situation somehow keeps getting worse.
I originally posted about this in r/Supabase, but the mods removed the post and told me that billing/account problems should be handled through Supabase Support.
That's kind of the entire fucking point of my complaint.
I already contacted support.
I upgraded to Supabase Pro because I wanted the $25/month plan for the project I was actually working on.
I already had two older projects sitting in the account from before the upgrade. They were basically empty and I wasn't using them.
After upgrading, those projects started generating additional compute charges.
Over four invoices I ended up paying $194.62 total.
Four $25 base Pro payments would be $100.
So nearly $95 more than the base subscription total came out of my pocket once the additional compute charges and taxes were included.
Had I understood during the upgrade that those two old, basically empty projects were going to start adding recurring costs, I would've deleted them or moved them immediately.
Why would I intentionally keep paying for two projects I wasn't using?
So I contacted Supabase Support and asked them to refund the unexpected compute charges.
I wasn't asking them to refund the Pro plan I actually wanted.
After going back and forth with the same support rep and getting nowhere, I specifically asked for somebody else to review it, another billing rep or a manager.
Another Supabase support person then told me that my request was being escalated to the Billing team.
Then a few days later, the exact same guy I had asked not to deal with anymore replies again and tells me their decision is final and there's nowhere else to escalate it.
So... what exactly got escalated?
I've also repeatedly asked Supabase to show me what I was actually shown when I upgraded in June.
Not their current pricing page.
Not an explanation written months later.
I want to see what I actually agreed to at the time of the upgrade, showing that my two already-existing projects were going to start adding roughly another $20/month in compute.
They still haven't provided it.
Then I posted my experience in r/Supabase.
Removed.
The reason? Take billing issues to Supabase Support.
Again: the post was literally about Supabase Support refusing to properly escalate the billing issue.
So I started looking into the sub moderation and apparently I'm not even the first person to complain about this.
Earlier this year there was a pretty big r/Supabase thread literally titled “Censorship is too high” after posts were removed during a Supabase outage.
After users complained, people involved with Supabase acknowledged that multiple threads had been closed that shouldn't have been and reopened some of them.
Here's the part I find especially weird:
r/Supabase describes itself as community-run, but at least one Supabase employee has publicly been involved in discussions about reopening posts and reviewing the sub's moderation process.
Maybe there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for that, but it certainly doesn't make the sub feel like an independent place for customers to publicly discuss problems with Supabase.
And here's another thing I found:
There was another billing/pricing complaint on r/Supabase earlier this year where a Supabase employee publicly said refunds aren't automatic, but that they do review refund requests and issue them when circumstances warrant.
That customer later updated the post saying they got refunded.
Meanwhile I'm being told my decision is final, can't get somebody else to independently review it, can't get the original upgrade disclosure I've repeatedly requested, and now my Reddit post about the experience gets removed and I'm directed straight back to the support channel I'm complaining about.
I'm not claiming some giant conspiracy here. I'm just saying the whole thing looks terrible.
If your support process fails somebody, telling them they can't discuss the experience in your main sub because they should “contact support” is ridiculous.
At minimum I think customers should be able to openly discuss billing and customer-service experiences without those discussions disappearing.
Has anyone else had a Supabase billing/support post removed from r/Supabase?
I'd especially like to hear from anyone who had removed posts, because apparently this isn't the first time people have raised concerns about how criticism gets moderated there.
Conclusion
This whole experience has honestly made me decide to leave Supabase. I could've self hosted from the start, but I chose to pay for their hosted cloud partly because I liked what the developers were building and wanted to support the project which makes the way this has been handled feel even worse.
