6 ms·

Supabase Series B

96 points by swyx 4y ago

kiwicopple 4y ago
Hey HN, supabase ceo here. The series B was announced earlier this year on Techcrunch, so this article is a bit more of a deep-dive into the round and how we'll use the funds. I'm repeating the same comment from earlier - I want to give a big shout-out to the HN crowd. You have been instrumental in our growth - both from a traction perspective, but even more so for product development. From our initial launch 2 years ago[0], where everyone told us we need auth, to our Auth[1], Storage[2], Functions[3], and GraphQL[4] launches. You are always giving great (and usually tough!) feedback which helps guide the team and product direction. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23319901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23319901 [1] Auth: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24072051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24072051 [2] Storage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26635184 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26635184 [3] Functions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30868849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30868849 [4] GraphQL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30846006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30846006
- yummybear 4y ago
  Thank you for a great product - that’s all :)
- felixthehat 4y ago
  I'm trying out supabase db & auth for a side project and I'm very impressed so far. I would love to have a usage-based pricing tier, as once I'm live I doubt I'll have enough users to merit $25/mo but I would still like to pay for daily backups etc
  - kiwicopple 4y ago
    It's something we hear a lot since Supabase is often used for small projects. For now, we need to focus on building a sustainable business, and in the future we should be able to support more users like yourself as we take on larger customers. There was an article on HN this week[0], which had a pertinent comment: "if your company wants to offer a free service, be sure that you can keep offering that for free." We feel we comfortable that our current pricing is long-term viable, and ideally any change we make will be to lower the prices rather than raise them. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32422505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32422505
  - rhodysurf 4y ago
    This is pretty much what keeps me from using it. The whole your project will be deleted in a week of no use thing is confusing to me too, As someone who has a full time job and wants to build stuff on weekends, my beta project is potentially killed because i skipped working on it for a weekend? Firestore is just too easy and cheap, $25 a month is a ton of money for that. Also at $25 a month my (dayjob) company will just want to use aws or azure since we already have accounts there.
    - imilk 4y ago
      It isn't deleted, it's just paused.
    - cpursley 4y ago
      $25 is a bargain for what you get. Supabase is open source, run it yourself.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- asadawadia 4y ago
  what exactly is the value proposition upon which you can raise millions?
  - swyx 4y ago
    they will make millions by offering a standard, battle tested, open source, managed backend "distro" for people who have better things to do than handroll it every time? what exactly is your question trying to do here
- ryanSrich 4y ago
  Hey, congrats on the round! $80m is a monster raise, really impressive. Are you able to discuss your revenue numbers at all? I'd be really curious what type of growth you're experiencing that has allowed you to raise as much as you have, and so quickly. We've been seeing 5-10x projections on revenue for Series B, so I'm guessing you're closer to $10m than $5m in ARR. Regardless, congrats again. The product looks really interesting, and I'll keep it in mind in the future for any projects that fit the bill.
  - kiwicopple 4y ago
    It's unlikely we'll discuss revenue numbers unless we ever decide to go public. Doing so would make us the target of the wrong sort of attention (people analyzing our financial viability, rather than focusing on the product). See Databricks as an example here[0] - "I promise that we’re not picking on Databricks for any reason other than that it committed the well-known sin of being more transparent than is traditional during its growth phase." It sounds like you're fundraising yourself, and if you are then keep in mind that we closed this round in April. The markets have changed significantly since them. Feel free to reach out directly if you want my personal opinions of the market conditions (my contact details are in my profile) [0] https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/19/rethinking-databricks-valuation-amid-a-changing-market/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/19/rethinking-databricks-valu...
  - BobbyJo 4y ago
    Multiples for Seed - Series C can vary wildly depending on a company's TAM, team, GTM strategy, among other things. I've seen series Bs at 100x revenue in hot spaces. M&As tend to be priced more consistently against revenue, due to the change in risk profile for the buyer, and even those multiples can have extreme differences.
joering2 4y ago
Checking the site now, since I never heard of Supabase, and I have a question: what is "lawyers.txt" file? Google doesn't find anything on it. https://supabase.com/lawyers.txt https://supabase.com/lawyers.txt Its noted in website footer. I know there is robot.txt but lawyers ?
- no_wizard 4y ago
  I think its just a fun things newer companies are doing, especially developer focused ones. Noticed it on a few websites of newer SAAS businesses like this.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- kiwicopple 4y ago
  It's a requirement for most software licenses to list (somewhere on the site/software) that you're using it. We call it lawyers.txt because every time we're fundraising the lawyers ask for it.
bitwidget 4y ago
With Supabase being a very similar product to Firebase, with the addition of a self hosted version (something that is hard to profit off of), what is the plan for the future in getting market share from Firebase users? I can see that GraphQL was added recently and that is a great feature that Firebase doesn't have, but features like that don't move significant people from Firebase to Supabase.
- swyx 4y ago
  it is honestly only superficially similar. Firebase has a proprietary nosql database, which is costly, lockin-y, and inflexible. Supabase uses postgres, which everyone can host, so the incentive is to compete on developer experience and moving faster on features than firebase can. when was the last time you saw anything firebase shipped on HN?
- conductr 4y ago
  Moving them from Firebase is perhaps the wrong action to measure initially. Instead, look at new projects only (not existing). If a large % of new projects start with Supabase instead of Firebase then they will eventually have a large number of total users (to monetize). Ideally, for Supabase as a business, this would combine with churn eroding Firebase's project/user count. And that's the story of how Supabase will eventually get acquired by one of the FANGs.
  - granshaw 4y ago
    A faang acquired firebase which will wither and soon a faang will acquire supabase, and so the circle of life goes on
    - replygirl 4y ago
      firebase could have real staying power. there's just so much value in the ecosystem already that i don't see another community replicating in the next five years. the nativescript firebase plugin is a great example of how firebase can save you hundreds of thousands on build
  - 4y ago
longrod 4y ago
Not to crash the party or anything. Supabase is great and all (congratulations BTW on such a huge series B!) but in terms of feature completeness and getting actual products built, it doesn't come close to Parse[0]. Same with Appwrite. Both of these are very popular but they either lack essential features or have them behind a subscription wall. For example, the OSS version of Supabase (last I checked) doesn't include the edge functions which are really important for easily computing stuff on the server side. Parse on the other hand is 100% open source and has a huge feature set. It's older than all of these lo-code tools and actually helps solve the issues one comes across when using such tools. Another thing is extending these tools which is a pain. For example, Parse supports multiple databases by default (postgres & MongoDB) and the ability to write a custom adapter if you need something else. Similarly, if you at any point need to go 100% custom it also makes that possible so you are never locked in. These tools however don't have that level of low-level control and are general all or nothing kind of tools best for small-to-medium sized problems which don't have a lot of room to grow. But both of these (Appwrite & Supabase) are super markety. Appwrite is all over the place with their ads, Supabase got a huge trend when it launched etc. Parse on the other hand is not too good at marketing their product being fully community run which is one reason not many know of it. Another is their not-so-fancy docs. I have no stake in any of these products: just my conclusion after having tried all of these. [0] https://parseplatform.org/ https://parseplatform.org/
- jacobsimon 4y ago
  Wow I had no idea Parse was still around and open source, I thought Facebook shut it down. It certainly was very popular back in the day!
- qabqabaca 4y ago
  True as that may be, in a production app I don't think breadth of features trumps having paid support, SLA's, comprehensive documentation, resources, tutorials etc. On top of that, funding like this gives a pretty optimistic outlook on the future of the project when compared to a fully community managed open-source project that could become abandonware.
- programmarchy 4y ago
wpietri 4y ago
Conspicuously missing for me from the graphs is anything indicating revenue. It's easy enough to get users if you give them free stuff. But a startup database company has an inherent weakness. Given how foundational databases are to a lot of projects, it's the technology choice where people are most inclined to pick safe, boring choices. I'm sure they're getting people to try it out, but how many of them are putting major things on it?
- virgildotcodes 4y ago
  If I’m not mistaken, one of the value propositions here is that it’s fundamentally Postgres, which should tick the boxes of safe and boring, no?
  - wpietri 4y ago
    If it's that boring, then why use it? Postgres is easy enough to install and there are plenty of reliable, profitable vendors providing it as a service. Presumably among their add-ons are features compelling enough to sign up to pay for ongoing service fees. But then what happens to the apps that depend on them if the company goes dark? We could well be entering the sort of extended recession that results in a venture capital drought.
    - virgildotcodes 4y ago
      I mean, the thing that got me to try Supabase was that they had the most generous free tier for Postgres that I could find, didn’t even care about their other features.
      - wpietri 4y ago
        That makes sense to me. And you you paying them money now?
        virgildotcodes 4y ago
        Not yet, I haven't exceeded the free tier on the personal projects I'm testing with them so far.
dzink 4y ago
Congrats! In terms of metrics demonstrated, showing cumulative growth charts is not helpful (vanity metric, always goes up to the right). Monthly incremental growth would be better to demonstrate product-driven growth instead. The chart with regards to React seems to show Supabase slowdown. That said, raising money in this environment is great and progress matters. Good luck!
Blixsz 4y ago
I see supabase as a missed opportunity to innovate in a space that desperately needs it. It could have been a product that fundamentaly reimagined the developer experience of working with a database. Instead they opted to mostly stick to the existing sql paradigm combined with some firebase-mimicking features. So what they end up with is a service that offers some marginal improvements over other, established database services but nothing truly game-changing.
- zinclozenge 4y ago
  Postgresql is itself a game changer for this kind of service. There was firebase, fauna, and some others, but no actual honest to god SQL. And thank god that it's postgres and not mysql.
  - swyx 4y ago
    why such strong preference for postgres? (i could list a number of typical reasons but just curious why “thank god” such strong emotional response)
    - zinclozenge 4y ago
      I'll be honest, at this point i have no idea why I like postgres more than mysql, but I have a feeling there's a good reason for that and I don't really want to re-learn why.
      - swyx 4y ago
        ok, the honesty is fine by me. just wanted to see in case there was something there. usual answer is devs love postgres for the feature set and ecosystem, sysadmins love mysql for the simplicity.
- techn00 4y ago
  What developer experience did you have in mind?
jononomo 4y ago
I really love Supabase -- so much so that I'm wondering if I can just take all their ideas, open-source contributions, and self-deployment guides -- and then just create a company to compete directly against them. Would that in fact be good for Supabase by forcing them to up their game (assuming I'm competent)? Is that what the magic of building a company with code in the open is?
- julienreszka 4y ago
  If you love them why not join them? Usually people start competitors out of dissatisfaction not the opposite ...?
  - jononomo 4y ago
    So I can make even more money? If they have a great idea and great execution and are going to make a ton of money, then maybe I should take all their stuff, offer it for $1 less, and then take half their business.
    - swyx 4y ago
      a company isn't just the code. its also the team, the community, the brand. good luck.
    - Terretta 4y ago
      You’re writing about it. They’re doing it. So far, they’re winning.
- cercatrova 4y ago
  This is a really interesting question that highlights the nature of open source and businesses. It is basically what Amazon did to many open source projects such that they've become non-open-source now, like MongoDB and ElasticSearch.
  - jononomo 4y ago
    Did MongoDB and ElasticSearch begin with the approach that Supabase is taking and then change their tune when Amazon did exactly what I am proposing?
flakiness 4y ago
The SE radio podcast has an episode with them and I enjoyed it, FYI. https://www.se-radio.net/2022/05/episode-511-ant-wilson-on-supabase-postgres-as-a-service/ https://www.se-radio.net/2022/05/episode-511-ant-wilson-on-s...
eikaramba 4y ago
Supabase and Directus are my go-to BaaS offerings. In terms of developing server side code(custom backend logic) Directus is still better than supabase. Also the Admin Interface is more capable. However in terms of performance supabase is of course way better. Lucky that we have such good options nowadays.
- culiao 4y ago
  Mind sharing an example tech stack with directus? Are you using it for auth as well? Been playing with it recently - wondering if I use directus as the CMS, and use something like firebase for auth? Thoughts?

96 points by swyx 4y ago

Hey HN, supabase ceo here. The series B was announced earlier this year on Techcrunch, so this article is a bit more of a deep-dive into the round and how we'll use the funds. I'm repeating the same comment from earlier - I want to give a big shout-out to the HN crowd. You have been instrumental in our growth - both from a traction perspective, but even more so for product development. From our initial launch 2 years ago[0], where everyone told us we need auth, to our Auth[1], Storage[2], Functions[3], and GraphQL[4] launches. You are always giving great (and usually tough!) feedback which helps guide the team and product direction. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23319901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23319901 [1] Auth: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24072051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24072051 [2] Storage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26635184 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26635184 [3] Functions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30868849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30868849 [4] GraphQL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30846006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30846006

yummybear 4y ago
Thank you for a great product - that’s all :)
felixthehat 4y ago
I'm trying out supabase db & auth for a side project and I'm very impressed so far. I would love to have a usage-based pricing tier, as once I'm live I doubt I'll have enough users to merit $25/mo but I would still like to pay for daily backups etc
- kiwicopple 4y ago
  It's something we hear a lot since Supabase is often used for small projects. For now, we need to focus on building a sustainable business, and in the future we should be able to support more users like yourself as we take on larger customers. There was an article on HN this week[0], which had a pertinent comment: "if your company wants to offer a free service, be sure that you can keep offering that for free." We feel we comfortable that our current pricing is long-term viable, and ideally any change we make will be to lower the prices rather than raise them. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32422505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32422505
- rhodysurf 4y ago
  This is pretty much what keeps me from using it. The whole your project will be deleted in a week of no use thing is confusing to me too, As someone who has a full time job and wants to build stuff on weekends, my beta project is potentially killed because i skipped working on it for a weekend? Firestore is just too easy and cheap, $25 a month is a ton of money for that. Also at $25 a month my (dayjob) company will just want to use aws or azure since we already have accounts there.
  - imilk 4y ago
    It isn't deleted, it's just paused.
  - cpursley 4y ago
    $25 is a bargain for what you get. Supabase is open source, run it yourself.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
asadawadia 4y ago
what exactly is the value proposition upon which you can raise millions?
- swyx 4y ago
  they will make millions by offering a standard, battle tested, open source, managed backend "distro" for people who have better things to do than handroll it every time? what exactly is your question trying to do here
ryanSrich 4y ago
Hey, congrats on the round! $80m is a monster raise, really impressive. Are you able to discuss your revenue numbers at all? I'd be really curious what type of growth you're experiencing that has allowed you to raise as much as you have, and so quickly. We've been seeing 5-10x projections on revenue for Series B, so I'm guessing you're closer to $10m than $5m in ARR. Regardless, congrats again. The product looks really interesting, and I'll keep it in mind in the future for any projects that fit the bill.
- kiwicopple 4y ago
  It's unlikely we'll discuss revenue numbers unless we ever decide to go public. Doing so would make us the target of the wrong sort of attention (people analyzing our financial viability, rather than focusing on the product). See Databricks as an example here[0] - "I promise that we’re not picking on Databricks for any reason other than that it committed the well-known sin of being more transparent than is traditional during its growth phase." It sounds like you're fundraising yourself, and if you are then keep in mind that we closed this round in April. The markets have changed significantly since them. Feel free to reach out directly if you want my personal opinions of the market conditions (my contact details are in my profile) [0] https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/19/rethinking-databricks-valuation-amid-a-changing-market/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/19/rethinking-databricks-valu...
- BobbyJo 4y ago
  Multiples for Seed - Series C can vary wildly depending on a company's TAM, team, GTM strategy, among other things. I've seen series Bs at 100x revenue in hot spaces. M&As tend to be priced more consistently against revenue, due to the change in risk profile for the buyer, and even those multiples can have extreme differences.

joering2 4y ago

Checking the site now, since I never heard of Supabase, and I have a question: what is "lawyers.txt" file? Google doesn't find anything on it. https://supabase.com/lawyers.txt https://supabase.com/lawyers.txt Its noted in website footer. I know there is robot.txt but lawyers ?

no_wizard 4y ago
I think its just a fun things newer companies are doing, especially developer focused ones. Noticed it on a few websites of newer SAAS businesses like this.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
kiwicopple 4y ago
It's a requirement for most software licenses to list (somewhere on the site/software) that you're using it. We call it lawyers.txt because every time we're fundraising the lawyers ask for it.

bitwidget 4y ago

With Supabase being a very similar product to Firebase, with the addition of a self hosted version (something that is hard to profit off of), what is the plan for the future in getting market share from Firebase users? I can see that GraphQL was added recently and that is a great feature that Firebase doesn't have, but features like that don't move significant people from Firebase to Supabase.

swyx 4y ago
it is honestly only superficially similar. Firebase has a proprietary nosql database, which is costly, lockin-y, and inflexible. Supabase uses postgres, which everyone can host, so the incentive is to compete on developer experience and moving faster on features than firebase can. when was the last time you saw anything firebase shipped on HN?
conductr 4y ago
Moving them from Firebase is perhaps the wrong action to measure initially. Instead, look at new projects only (not existing). If a large % of new projects start with Supabase instead of Firebase then they will eventually have a large number of total users (to monetize). Ideally, for Supabase as a business, this would combine with churn eroding Firebase's project/user count. And that's the story of how Supabase will eventually get acquired by one of the FANGs.
- granshaw 4y ago
  A faang acquired firebase which will wither and soon a faang will acquire supabase, and so the circle of life goes on
  - replygirl 4y ago
    firebase could have real staying power. there's just so much value in the ecosystem already that i don't see another community replicating in the next five years. the nativescript firebase plugin is a great example of how firebase can save you hundreds of thousands on build
- 4y ago

longrod 4y ago

Not to crash the party or anything. Supabase is great and all (congratulations BTW on such a huge series B!) but in terms of feature completeness and getting actual products built, it doesn't come close to Parse[0]. Same with Appwrite. Both of these are very popular but they either lack essential features or have them behind a subscription wall. For example, the OSS version of Supabase (last I checked) doesn't include the edge functions which are really important for easily computing stuff on the server side. Parse on the other hand is 100% open source and has a huge feature set. It's older than all of these lo-code tools and actually helps solve the issues one comes across when using such tools. Another thing is extending these tools which is a pain. For example, Parse supports multiple databases by default (postgres & MongoDB) and the ability to write a custom adapter if you need something else. Similarly, if you at any point need to go 100% custom it also makes that possible so you are never locked in. These tools however don't have that level of low-level control and are general all or nothing kind of tools best for small-to-medium sized problems which don't have a lot of room to grow. But both of these (Appwrite & Supabase) are super markety. Appwrite is all over the place with their ads, Supabase got a huge trend when it launched etc. Parse on the other hand is not too good at marketing their product being fully community run which is one reason not many know of it. Another is their not-so-fancy docs. I have no stake in any of these products: just my conclusion after having tried all of these. [0] https://parseplatform.org/ https://parseplatform.org/

jacobsimon 4y ago
Wow I had no idea Parse was still around and open source, I thought Facebook shut it down. It certainly was very popular back in the day!
qabqabaca 4y ago
True as that may be, in a production app I don't think breadth of features trumps having paid support, SLA's, comprehensive documentation, resources, tutorials etc. On top of that, funding like this gives a pretty optimistic outlook on the future of the project when compared to a fully community managed open-source project that could become abandonware.
programmarchy 4y ago

wpietri 4y ago

Conspicuously missing for me from the graphs is anything indicating revenue. It's easy enough to get users if you give them free stuff. But a startup database company has an inherent weakness. Given how foundational databases are to a lot of projects, it's the technology choice where people are most inclined to pick safe, boring choices. I'm sure they're getting people to try it out, but how many of them are putting major things on it?

virgildotcodes 4y ago
If I’m not mistaken, one of the value propositions here is that it’s fundamentally Postgres, which should tick the boxes of safe and boring, no?
- wpietri 4y ago
  If it's that boring, then why use it? Postgres is easy enough to install and there are plenty of reliable, profitable vendors providing it as a service. Presumably among their add-ons are features compelling enough to sign up to pay for ongoing service fees. But then what happens to the apps that depend on them if the company goes dark? We could well be entering the sort of extended recession that results in a venture capital drought.
  - virgildotcodes 4y ago
    I mean, the thing that got me to try Supabase was that they had the most generous free tier for Postgres that I could find, didn’t even care about their other features.
    - wpietri 4y ago
      That makes sense to me. And you you paying them money now?
      - virgildotcodes 4y ago
        Not yet, I haven't exceeded the free tier on the personal projects I'm testing with them so far.

dzink 4y ago

Congrats! In terms of metrics demonstrated, showing cumulative growth charts is not helpful (vanity metric, always goes up to the right). Monthly incremental growth would be better to demonstrate product-driven growth instead. The chart with regards to React seems to show Supabase slowdown. That said, raising money in this environment is great and progress matters. Good luck!

Blixsz 4y ago

I see supabase as a missed opportunity to innovate in a space that desperately needs it. It could have been a product that fundamentaly reimagined the developer experience of working with a database. Instead they opted to mostly stick to the existing sql paradigm combined with some firebase-mimicking features. So what they end up with is a service that offers some marginal improvements over other, established database services but nothing truly game-changing.

zinclozenge 4y ago
Postgresql is itself a game changer for this kind of service. There was firebase, fauna, and some others, but no actual honest to god SQL. And thank god that it's postgres and not mysql.
- swyx 4y ago
  why such strong preference for postgres? (i could list a number of typical reasons but just curious why “thank god” such strong emotional response)
  - zinclozenge 4y ago
    I'll be honest, at this point i have no idea why I like postgres more than mysql, but I have a feeling there's a good reason for that and I don't really want to re-learn why.
    - swyx 4y ago
      ok, the honesty is fine by me. just wanted to see in case there was something there. usual answer is devs love postgres for the feature set and ecosystem, sysadmins love mysql for the simplicity.
techn00 4y ago
What developer experience did you have in mind?

jononomo 4y ago

I really love Supabase -- so much so that I'm wondering if I can just take all their ideas, open-source contributions, and self-deployment guides -- and then just create a company to compete directly against them. Would that in fact be good for Supabase by forcing them to up their game (assuming I'm competent)? Is that what the magic of building a company with code in the open is?

julienreszka 4y ago
If you love them why not join them? Usually people start competitors out of dissatisfaction not the opposite ...?
- jononomo 4y ago
  So I can make even more money? If they have a great idea and great execution and are going to make a ton of money, then maybe I should take all their stuff, offer it for $1 less, and then take half their business.
  - swyx 4y ago
    a company isn't just the code. its also the team, the community, the brand. good luck.
  - Terretta 4y ago
    You’re writing about it. They’re doing it. So far, they’re winning.
cercatrova 4y ago
This is a really interesting question that highlights the nature of open source and businesses. It is basically what Amazon did to many open source projects such that they've become non-open-source now, like MongoDB and ElasticSearch.
- jononomo 4y ago
  Did MongoDB and ElasticSearch begin with the approach that Supabase is taking and then change their tune when Amazon did exactly what I am proposing?

flakiness 4y ago

The SE radio podcast has an episode with them and I enjoyed it, FYI. https://www.se-radio.net/2022/05/episode-511-ant-wilson-on-supabase-postgres-as-a-service/ https://www.se-radio.net/2022/05/episode-511-ant-wilson-on-s...

eikaramba 4y ago

Supabase and Directus are my go-to BaaS offerings. In terms of developing server side code(custom backend logic) Directus is still better than supabase. Also the Admin Interface is more capable. However in terms of performance supabase is of course way better. Lucky that we have such good options nowadays.

culiao 4y ago
Mind sharing an example tech stack with directus? Are you using it for auth as well? Been playing with it recently - wondering if I use directus as the CMS, and use something like firebase for auth? Thoughts?