Supabase Blog
supabase.com · Company blog · on HN since 2021
Supabase's company blog covers its open-source Postgres-based backend platform, including auth, edge functions, pgvector and Postgres tooling.
What HN saysCommenters recommend Supabase as a modern open-source Firebase alternative with a great free tier and an easy Postgres backend.
286HN people shared it
186linked it in comments
208stories submitted
7.0Kstory points
3 months agolast shared
2021people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Superbase – Open-source Firebase alt. – Build in a weekend Scale to billions39 people · 4 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 2Postgres WASM10 people · 887 points · first shared 2022 · 185 comments on HN
- 3Pricing9 people · first shared 2022
- 4Supabase Acquires OrioleDB7 people · 25 points · first shared 2024 · 6 comments on HN
- 5Multigres: Vitess for Postgres6 people · 49 points · first shared 2025 · 17 comments on HN
- 6Show HN: Supabase Clippy – ChatGPT for Supabase Docs6 people · 37 points · first shared 2023 · 12 comments on HN
- 7Should I Open Source my Company?6 people · 29 points · first shared 2022 · 1 comments on HN
- 8Pgvector: Embeddings and vector similarity – Supabase Docs6 people · 2 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 9Pg_GraphQL: A GraphQL Extension for PostgreSQL5 people · 431 points · first shared 2021 · 99 comments on HN
- 10Choosing a Postgres Primary Key5 people · 27 points · first shared 2022 · 2 comments on HN
- 11Supabase Wrappers: A Framework for Building Postgres Foreign Data Wrappers5 people · 16 points · first shared 2022 · 6 comments on HN
- 12Pg_jsonschema: JSON Schema Support for Postgres5 people · 5 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 13Storing OpenAI embeddings in Postgres with pgvector5 people · 1 points · first shared 2023 · 1 comments on HN
- 14Row level security5 people · first shared 2024
- 15Supavisor: Scaling Postgres to 1M Connections4 people · 14 points · first shared 2023 · 1 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
lukeweston1234 · 2025-01-24
https://supabase.com/ is very clean with a nice information hierarchy.
https://www.postgresql.org/ despite being quite technical, these docs are very easy to follow in a self learning format.
The new Angular and React docs are quite nice.
ochiba · 2024-03-22
Okay great. In that case I can also recommend Supabase [1] since it's an easy way to spin up a Postgres backend and gives you auth, edge functions, etc.
[1] https://supabase.com/
no_wizard · 2023-07-06
you might find Supabase[0] is closer to what you need. I'd recommend giving them a look, that is, if MySQL compat isn't a requirement of course, since Supabase is all PostgresSQL.
disclosure: not a employee or investor in Supabase, but I sure am a fan.
[0]: https://supabase.com/
dkh · 2023-05-30
Supabase[1] is a popular, open-source[2], and very modern alternative with a great free tier!
[1] https://supabase.com/
[2] https://github.com/supabase/supabase
fullstackchris · 2023-01-07
As an alternative, if you containerize everything in the stack, you can simply spool up another seperate and isolated stack of containers for each given customer. Then it's also trivial if they want it 'on premise' somewhere or 'in the cloud'. No need to try and add complexity at the schema level and make a monolith support multiple tenants.
Also, this list is quite literally supabase (https://supabase.com/) - I cannot recommend enough, especially if OP is solo, which it sounds like is the case.
fragile_frogs · 2022-06-22
Convex queries remind me of RethinkDB's query language (ReQL). RethinkDB also had the horizon project[0], looking at todays projects like Convex, Thin[1] and supabase[2], kinda makes me wonder what the RethinkDB guys could have build.
RethinkDB was such a great project.
[0] https://rethinkdb.com/blog/horizon-release
[1] https://thin.dev/
[2] https://supabase.com
andsoitis · 2023-06-16
> Not sure if you are new to the internet :)
:-)
> to give you one example of many https://supabase.com/ This is how you can position yourself and be understood by the target user if the product is for them
Supabase headline reads: "Supabase is an open source Firebase alternative for building secure and performant Postgres backends with minimal configuration."
Still don't know what it is, other than I should go to the Firebase website to find out. There I read at the top: "Firebase is an app development platform that helps you build and grow apps and games users love. Backed by Google and trusted by millions of businesses around the world."
And right after there's a "Get Started" button.
Since supabase is just an open source alternative (according to their copy) of Firebase (but is it really? it talks about postgres backends not apps?), I'd rather go with the thought leader in this space. Supabase, if you're reading this: what's your elevator pitch? What makes you the leader for building apps or whatever it is you do? Why would I want to follow you?
jamest · 2022-10-15
[Firebase founder]
I no longer work at Firebase / Google, but two points:
1. There may be issues with the GCP integrations & UX/DX, but GCP integration is good for many customers and necessary for the future of the business.
One of the common failure modes for the 2011-2014 crop of Backend-as-a-Service offerings was their inability to technically support large customers. The economics of developer tooling are a super-power-law. So, if you hope to pay your employees you'll need to grow with your biggest customers.
Eventually, as they become TheNextBigThing, your biggest customers end up wanting the bells and whistles that only a Big Cloud Platform provide.
This was a part of the reason we chose to join Google, and why the Firebase team really really really pushed hard to integrate with GCP at a project, billing, and product level (philosophy: Firebase exposed the product from the client, GCP from the server) despite all the organizational/political overhead.
2. I'm excited to see the current crop of app platforms emerge. It has been 10 years since we launched (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3832877) and there are now some great innovations in the space. I like the way Supabase (https://supabase.com/) has exposed Postgres and InstantDB (https://www.instantdb.com) graphdb+realtime is really promising.
willchen · 2025-09-19
we have an extensive system prompt to instruct the Supabase to follow RLS best practices: https://github.com/dyad-sh/dyad/blob/de2cc2b48f2c8bfa401608c63b5fa325b…
What you're describing as the fail-open behavior is from the Supabase platform (and not specific to any app builders): https://supabase.com/docs/guides/database/postgres/row-level-security#…
Keyframe · 2025-07-08
[3] https://supabase.com/.well-known/security.txt
That "What we promise:" section reads like a not so subtle threat framing, rather than a collaborative, even welcoming tone one might expect. Signaling a legal risk which is conditionally withheld rather than focusing on, I don't know, trust and collaboration would deter me personally from reaching out since I have an allergy towards "silent threats".
But, that's just like my opinion man on your remark about "XYZ did not follow our responsible disclosure processes [3] or respond to our messages to help work together on this.", so you might take another look at your guidelines there.
inian · 2025-07-02
Supabase | https://supabase.com/ | Remote
Supabase is the Postgres Development Platform and we are looking for Product Managers and Technical Program managers. You will be working with very strong Product Engineers across a wide variety of products (Postgres, realtime, storage, Queues, etc). If you enjoy working on developer tools and like to get your hands dirty, check out our open product roles
- Product Manager https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/supabase/74542052-f648-48fb-a8fe-a8c5cd14a74e
- Technical Program Manager https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/supabase/b83c7316-77ce-49a8-a199-9f46b1d4d2dd
We are also hiring for other engineering and growth roles - https://supabase.com/careers
ezekg · 2025-07-01
Some cool scaling stuff [0] [1] coming out for pg lately. Looking forward to seeing what PS builds here, I've been a big fan for awhile.
Would love more details tbh, but will be watching regardless.
[0]: https://supabase.com/blog/multigres-vitess-for-postgres
[1]: https://pgdog.dev
maxloh · 2025-05-25
What is the difference between this project and Supabase?
Does this project have a different focus than Supabase regarding the features to be implemented?
Supabase: https://supabase.com/
jauntywundrkind · 2025-01-16
Loved the Supabase coverage from a month ago, showing under the hood what DBOS is storing & how the data flow works on it. It made real what DBOS was for me, clicked; before DBOS felt very abstract to me.
https://supabase.com/blog/durable-workflows-in-postgres-dbos https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42379974
filipecabaco · 2025-01-10
Supabase | Senior Elixir Engineer | APAC | Remote | https://supabase.com/
We're hiring to grow our Elixir teams mainly on Supavisor and Realtime projects. You will be using Elixir and also help build new client libs mainly in TS. We work in an opensource manner so you can check our code in https://github.com/supabase/realtime and https://github.com/supabase/supavisor.
* Senior Elixir Engineer: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/supabase/46ffc00b-b9a7-4b45-a6f2-1a397a197f8a
Any question, email me at [email protected]
laktek · 2024-11-07
Congrats on the launch! It's great to see more companies build serverless offerings on top of Deno.
I lead Supabase Edge Functions product, a similar offering built on top of Deno runtime too. We have open-sourced our runtime (https://github.com/supabase/edge-runtime), and it's self-hostable. It supports NPM, node built-ins, pluggable storage, and web sockets. We also have a built-in API for AI inference (https://supabase.com/blog/ai-inference-now-available-in-supabase-edge-…
Supabase Edge Runtime is easy to self-host (works great as a multi-threaded JS web server). We love community contributions :) Let us know if you would like to collaborate.
codeptualize · 2024-09-13
Supabase.
We do also use their auth, storage, api, etc. But even if you just want to host a postgres db it's still worth checking out I think.
It's managed postgres, 2 free db's, connection pooler, super easy read replicas (requires a larger paid instance), backups, lots of tooling/dashboards/advisories, cli for running locally during development, database branching, backups, fdw, and lots more. All of it open source.
You can turn off the data api's etc if you just want to connect directly: https://supabase.com/docs/guides/database/hardening-data-api#disabling…
Proziam · 2024-08-07
I suggest the following stack:
Supabase - User Auth & Database
Stripe - Subscriptions & Payments
React or Svelte - Building landing and product pages
These tools are extremely popular and well documented, so anything you get stuck on is bound to be readily searchable online. If you've already got over a decade of front-end work experience I'd say just spin up Sveltekit or NextJS and follow along with a guide like this one:
Supabase Auth - https://supabase.com/docs/guides/auth/server-side/sveltekit
dventimihasura · 2024-06-04
I see it differently. In the 25 years I've been working in this industry I see a welcome trend toward doing more in the database, such that the impedance mismatch dissipates. This is from a low-water mark 20 years ago or so, when most Java developers I knew kept the database at arm's length, insisting it met them on their terms rather than the other way around.
https://gist.github.com/cpursley/c8fb81fe8a7e5df038158bdfe0f06dbb
https://supabase.com/
One way to eliminate the Java-SQL impedance (for example) mismatch is to delete Java altogether, along with JOOQ, Hibernate, and Spring (for example).
kiwicopple · 2024-06-02
(Supabase team member)
Congrats on shipping, this looks nice and well thought-out
One possible correction: the only code we generate for a user is either SQL migrations or TS types (if devs want to use the TS client). I’m not sure many would classify Supabase as NoCode, and we strongly recommend users use CI/CD development with our CLI and database migrations
https://supabase.com/docs/guides/cli/local-development#database-migrat…
xyzeva · 2024-03-18
On certain databases, yes
We only scanned for firestore, which is a NoSQL database, conversion tools may still be possible, a good firebase alternative would be https://supabase.com, but please set up RLS, its IMO much easier then Firebase.
nicoburns · 2023-12-15
EDIT: Oh, perhaps it follows this table? https://supabase.com/docs/guides/platform/compute-add-ons
---
Original comment:
Hmm... this seems to say 8GB storage, 250GB bandwidth and 7 day backups (not point in time) for $25/month? + 7 day point in time backups for an extra $100/month? But it doesn't seem to mention anything about the CPU or RAM specs of the database server? And it also seems to bundle a bunch of other things, so it's hard to know how much of that is for the database server...
Will it be possible to choose different sized servers? And to buy managed Postgres on it's own without running the whole of superbase?
smallerfish · 2023-12-15
Very nice. I've never really liked Supabase's network restrictions setup (https://supabase.com/docs/guides/platform/network-restrictions), and IIRC when I looked at it there was some weird issue exposing the Fly IP for your app to Supabase, and locking Supabase down to it. Having Supabase actually within the Fly network is great. Congrats to both teams.
sharemywin · 2023-08-25
1. it's using "semantic" search. so if the embeddings understand that "inline subquery" and "lateral joins" are more closely related than say cross joins or something then that doc segment will get returned.
2. the use cases for this would be you want shorter answers then a collection of document snippets and or you had follow up questions that might not be in the same document. and/or you prefer conversing with a chatobot over reading lots of extra text.
3. you can attach a source column to the embeddings and snippet in the vector database.
Here's an explanation of pgvector using supabase
https://supabase.com/docs/guides/database/extensions/pgvector
it's basically just a special kind of index to use on an embeddings column.
chasers · 2023-08-11
supabase dev here...
this was a very fun load test to run. happy to answer any questions.
shoutout to José Valim and the Dashbit team for the help on Supavisor. elixir and erlang are amazing tools.
connection limits, even with pgbouncer, have been a big support burden for us. supavisor should let us be more liberal with connections we allot to folks.
supavisor is rolled out and available for all projects to use today. contact support[0] and we can expose the supavisor connection string in your dashboard. we'll be proactively exposing it to everyone gradually over the next ~1 month. we'll run pgbouncer and supavisor both for you for probably ~5 months before you need to switch to supavisor.
also very excited at the potential features a custom postgres proxy can unlock.
[0] https://supabase.com/dashboard/support/new
theultdev · 2023-08-09
Wow, these are very useful.
Is there an example project that demos the best way to setup these features?
edit: I see TFA links to the docs where most things are covered (https://supabase.com/docs/guides/cli)
oleg009 · 2023-06-16
Not sure if you are new to the internet :) to give you one example of many https://supabase.com/
This is how you can position yourself and be understood by the target user if the product is for them
fmerian · 2023-05-26
among my favorite apps/websites that support dark mode:
- https://around.co/
- https://fig.io/
- https://linear.app/
- https://liveblocks.io/
- https://raycast.com/
- https://supabase.com/
- https://volta.net/
hope it inspires :)
steve-chavez · 2023-05-19
Definitely check out "choose your comfort level"[1].
> PostgREST's limitations also had me going back to an API server architecture because I definitely didn't want to write logic in database functions.
Because of PostgREST's philosophy[2], you're expected to write database functions(not necessarily SQL, since PostgreSQL offers many PLs).
So if you're not comfortable with that, you can treat PostgreSQL just as a data store and pair it up with your favorite ORM. Supabase doesn't force you to use PostgREST.
[1]: https://supabase.com/docs/guides/getting-started/architecture#choose-y…
[2]: https://postgrest.org/en/latest/#database-as-single-source-of-truth
nonethewiser · 2023-04-27
Great article and underlying point. Reminds me of https://www.amazingcto.com/postgres-for-everything/ which also highlights FTS by linking to this article: https://supabase.com/blog/postgres-full-text-search-vs-the-rest