Lots of databases are open by default, especially in this space (Mongo, RethinkDB, Redis, Riak, and I believe Cassandra), and Fauxton has huge warnings that you

Lots of databases are open by default, especially in this space (Mongo, RethinkDB, Redis, Riak, and I believe Cassandra), and Fauxton has huge warnings that you've got access turned on globally if you haven't adjusted the setting, so I'm not sure I agree with you that that's an instant fail, but I get your point. That said, in CouchDB 2, it'll be easy to programmatically restrict document information in a similar method to Firebase. I can't find the CouchDB 2 documentation itself, but https://github.com/rcouch/rcouch/wiki/Validate-documents-on-read https://github.com/rcouch/rcouch/wiki/Validate-documents-on-... , from rcouch, is the current plan. Do note that CouchDB doesn't do Firebase-like OAuth workflows, so you'd still need a thin shim in prod to handle that if you don't want to have all bespoke user accounts, all the time. (There's probably a clever way to make this work using client-side OAuth workflows, but I've never actually thought about it much.)