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Ask HN: Does any one know if Firebase is a successful from Google's perspective?
Recently, we haven’t seen much marketing for Firebase, Google’s core Backend-as-a-Service product.
Given Google’s well‑known reputation for discontinuing products that don’t meet its internal success criteria, I’m wondering whether Firebase is considered successful by Google’s standards.
They’ve already begun deprecating individual services under the Firebase umbrella—for example, Firebase Dynamic Links (https://firebase.google.com/support/dynamic-links-faq).
Does anyone know where Firebase’s App Backend‑as‑a‑Service is headed?
- OSDeveloper 1y agoIt is still used a lot by many hundreds of corporations and likely makes them profit, so I would assume yes.
- muzani 1y agoWe use it too, but anything that requires actual funds, we would migrate to AWS or refactor. Like we'd use to allow PMs to change banners/copy on the fly, but Supabase is better. It does RAG but Supabase does that better too. Firebase functions are really good for prototyping, but once it starts to cost money, we move it to AWS. It's good for feature flagging, and we moved that to Growthbook. Analytics started on Firebase and were moved to open source so we'd own the data. The only thing they do well is Crashlytics and that's free. If everyone was as bad a customer as us, I would assume they're in trouble. Unfortunately a lot of people have trust issues with Google. We don't want them controlling data and certainly nothing as core as functions, DB, and feature flagging. Then when people don't use these things, Google kills it real fast.
- OSDeveloper 1y agoI suppose, but firebase is used in some applications, though of course a lot of them are just during testing, so assuming everyone was not like you they would make profit, but assuming a mix, they would make only a bit of profit, so it would be more like a small side project/nice feature that google provides that makes them a little bit of money.
- spacebanana7 1y agoFirebase justifies its existence by serving as a customer acquisition vehicle for GCP. This is actually quite valuable given the huge marketing costs required to get a new enterprise cloud customer. You're likely concerned about the precedent of Facebook shutting down Parse back in the day, leaving many projects stranded. Facebook though had no real commercial interest in cloud services back then.
- dtagames 1y agoIt's a brilliant on-ramp for that, too, with high free usage caps that let you get projects up and running at no cost. Firebase hosting only charges you when an actual thing you've deployed starts getting significant usage. It's a terrific option for small devs who still want custom domains, backend data, and the freedom to code in JS/TS in the browser.
- stormfather 1y agoYeah but if you need features like Cloud Functions or SMS auth you have to give your credit card... with no spending limit... and the standard practice is to expose your firebase creds on the client... and their stated stance is its better to let you get attacked and then maybe waive the charges than to interrupt service to your site for a few hours... lol. Your recourse is to go viral on social media and get them to forgive the debt. As a small dev firebase is horrifying.
- spacebanana7 1y agoIt's annoying, but I'm not aware of anywhere you can get SMS auth without similar issues? Would love to learn if there are any.
- stormfather 1y agoSupabase does. It has a spending cap, so you won't wake up to a 100k bill if you get hacked. An app I recently consulted for used fireabase SMS auth. Someone spammed their sign-in page and they were hit with multiple 4-figure charges. Firebase refuses to refund of course. Its a great model until it really, really isn't.
- giorgioz 1y agoLiterally yesterday a friend linked the announcement of Firebase Studio with AI building of apps on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIRCBFCyk4X/?igsh=OHlraW5jYWtyd2w1 https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIRCBFCyk4X/?igsh=OHlraW5jYWt...
- owebmaster 1y agoWhich is quite different
- Gothmog69 1y agoWhat's quite different?
- owebmaster 1y agoThe original Firebase and what Google is calling Firebase Studio
- lbhdc 1y agoFor big companies like this, I like to go look at the activity on sdks and related projects. Typically activity will flat line before a sun setting announcement is made. Its hard to say how much lead time that buys you, but I have found it a useful barometer. It seems like the firebase repos have had a fair amount of activity. https://github.com/orgs/firebase/repositories https://github.com/orgs/firebase/repositories
- 999900000999 1y agoI don't see Google ending firebase anytime soon, but I don't like building inside of closed systems anymore. It's very very difficult to migrate to a different service provider. Since Firebase is ultimately closed source, it's not your app. Your sharing it with Google. Running a custom solution with Render(Heroku, etc) takes a bit more effort, but it's mine. I can actually open source it. I have more control. For my current project I went from Firebase, to Superbase and settled on Django. I have some fairly complex logic and supabase just wasn't cutting it.
- ecesena 1y agoThey just launched https://firebase.studio https://firebase.studio
- d3m3ns 1y ago[dead]