26 ms·

Supabase raises $200M Series D at $2B valuation

342 points by baristaGeek 1y ago

janosch_123 1y ago
Congrats to Anthony and the team! What an amazing milestone.
otterley 1y ago
That’s a lot of money. What’s Supabase’s exit strategy? Are they sustainable long term as a standalone business? You can also see how money is starting to chase “vibe coding” — as long as you say the magic words, even if your product is only tangentially related to it, you can get funding!
- 9283409232 1y ago
  Acquisition. All of these VC companies raise unsustainable levels of money in hopes of acquisition or IPO. Supabase seems to be leaning towards acquisition.
- candiddevmike 1y ago
  Reading the tea leaves, Series D means they opted for more funding vs IPO. They claim to have 2 million users, but they're open core so how many are paying? Maybe their books aren't looking that great. Wall street doesn't understand database vendors outside of "big data", so they're probably hoping for acquisition. Not sure who would buy them though, as PostgreSQL vendors are kind of a dime-a-dozen these days...
  - clvx 1y ago
    If lovable, bolt.new, etc kept integrating with them, that's a money maker without needing to do much sales. There's a wave of AI tools that require somehow save state and Supabase provides that. I'm absolutely amazed others haven't jumped in the same ship yet.
    - philomath_mn 1y ago
      That definitely seems to be the play. Keep funneling in users from Lovable/bolt.new and keep building revenue or hope to be acquired if one of those vibe coding tools gets huge.
    - StrandedKitty 1y ago
      In the short term yes, but why would you as an end user of lovable and similar tools prefer expensive Supabase? If you already have an AI developer at your disposal you might as well make it figure out how to properly set up and maintain AWS, right? Maybe it can't do it now -- too complicated because there's no simple AI-accessible interface, and LLM models are simply not smart enough yet, but I imagine it will change soon.
  - adamnemecek 1y ago
    > Not sure who would buy them though, as PostgreSQL vendors are kind of a dime-a-dozen these days... Supabase defo has a much higher mindshare.
    - TechDebtDevin 1y ago
      Sure but ultimately they're still just selling something that is already free and wrapping AWS. These business models aren't sustainable unless you trash your free product, which also isn't sustainable. Presumably they have a good deal with their cloud vendor, AWS I think, but I think its safe to assume they lose A LOT on their free products.
      - adamnemecek 1y ago
        The whole premise of cloud hosting businesses is that people don't want to manage stuff themselves.
        hirako2000 1y ago
        They end up managing stuff themselves anyway. Plus managing another kind of bills.
        adamnemecek 1y ago
        AWS seems to be doing fine.
  - firtoz 1y ago
    A lot are paying, including me for multiple projects. They have a pretty good offering. I used to use them for dev and prod, but now using neon for dev. Supabase still for prod. I had switched from mongo to supabase. I may switch to neon for prod but not in a rush. They also offer so much more than just postgres. Though I use them only for postgres myself.
    - drewnick 1y ago
      Since you use both supabase and neon, any particular strength or weakness to keep supabase for prod? I just moved my app to neon today (easy enough to test it!) and am enjoying the auto-scaling features and UI is great on neon. But I'm curious about how supabase stacks up.
      - firtoz 1y ago
        Supabase feels less flexible. Also it tries to do many other things so I don't think they can focus fully on the db side. However it still works well enough for production so cannot complain too much. I haven't done benchmarks for performance latency etc though. I should!
  - BoorishBears 1y ago
    > so how many are paying This is like if Google Spanner were open sourced tomorrow morning: realistically how many people are going to learn how to deploy a thing that was built by Google for Google to serve an ultra-specific persona? Maybe you might get some Amazon-sized whale peeking at it for bits to improve their own product, but the entire value prop is that it's a managed service: you're probably going to continue paying for it to be managed for you.
    - badestrand 1y ago
      IMO it also depends on how the whole process is tied together. I always loved Vercel for their easy hosting of Next.js with included CI/CD, but I recently switched to self-hosting - their pricing switched from a flat, worry-free $20/month to an unpredictable whatever-it-may-cost plus it sent me 10+ emails every single month about hitting some quotas that they introduced and I couldn't find a good way to stop that.
  - tschellenbach 1y ago
    it's an aggressive preemptive round, so i'd guess 2b/50 = 40M of revenue. Probably low margins since the free tier/ hosting postgres nature of the business.
  - alp1n3_eth 1y ago
    A lot of people don't self-host it, even though it is open core. This is due to their docs being garbage and tons of differences between the offerings, so you can't even rely on the main docs if you're self-hosting. It's easier to just become familiar with a DB UI tool like Beekeeper or DataGrip and spin up your own things. I'm also not a huge fan of being "locked-in" to so many things (including their auth). I think most projects would be better off keeping these parts separated, even if they are using third-party services to handle them, as it would be way less overhead to migrate out.
- colesantiago 1y ago
  > What’s Supabase’s exit strategy? Are they sustainable long term as a standalone business? Acquisition best case, Private Equity worst case. Do you see Supabase going public on the stock market? Perhaps unless they do what Cloudflare done and are replicating AWS, it may be hard to see a stock market debut. Could be wrong though.
  - fakedang 1y ago
    Supabase is basically AWS Postgres under the hood. It's popular amongst hobbyists and small teams but I'm not sure whether any large teams actively use it. Once you're past the point of serious business, it's much more cost effective to host everything by yourself.
    - lillecarl 1y ago
      What is serious business? I think supabase can scale brilliantly, and it doesn't lock you in, if you have need for some special infra you can build and integrate it, I don't know but you could possibly even use FDW to access a postgres you run yourself. Also they can't run on AWS postgres with all their postgres plug-ins AFAIK. The point of "cheaper to host everything yourself" is a lot higher than what most estimate. My only concern is that is supabase goes out of business or go evil you're gonna have a bad time, however everything is open-source
      - fakedang 1y ago
        Serious business is when you need to maintain uptime and stability. Not just me, but a lot of folks on the Supabase reddit have complained often about the insane downtimes that we've experienced at times with the platform. I would 100% use it for prototypes and MVPs, but for production? Neither me nor a lot of others would touch it with a pole, even though I'm sure your experience might be different.
    - ZiiS 1y ago
      Supabase at is minimum providing a PostgreSQL server, pooler (they started on pgbouncer, how their own) and a PostREST API, and support, backup, logging etc. You can be doing serious business and not have the time/people to run these reliably self-hosted. They also provide Auth almost to the Auth0 level and Edge functions like Vercel, S3 like storage (sharing the db's permission system), and websocket/presence backed by Elixir. TBH they are a compelling value, at least for us.
- diggan 1y ago
  > Are they sustainable long term as a standalone business? It's bananas to me that questions like these could be unanswered even 5 years after the business started. This possibly cannot be the most efficient way for finding new solutions and "disrupting" stale industries?
  - jsheard 1y ago
    > It's bananas to me that questions like these could be unanswered even 5 years after the business started. Those are rookie numbers, Discord is coming up on 10 years old and has made zero dollars to date, yet is supposedly considering an IPO soon.
    - hashamali 1y ago
      Discord has a fairly successful subscription product that is generating tens of millions in revenue. They most certainly have made more than 0 dollars. Profitable? Less likely.
      - jsheard 1y ago
        Yeah I meant zero profit, poor wording on my part.
    - bombcar 1y ago
      The IPO is how (the shareholders) make money, by selling to bagholders.
    - vecter 1y ago
      It's very common for tech companies to go public without being profitable. As long as their growth is good and they have a reasonable story for how they will achieve profitability, then it typically makes sense. Of course every company is different and not all will reach their profitability goals post-IPO, but in many cases, it wouldn't make sense to wait for profitability before going public.
      - 1y ago
- lionkor 1y ago
  What an absolute joke. Their exit strategy is presumably to keep chasing the high and find more ways to integrate AI. The era of building good software for fun and profit is coming to an end.
  - lillecarl 1y ago
    I think their product is sound, they build essentially a backend as a service platform on open-source software. That doesn't make it easy to run at scale, so you probably wanna use their paid offering unless you plan to hire a lot of staff to maintain it, but it is possible and they support small scale dev envs
    - ZiiS 1y ago
      100% this; we have a 4 digit monthly spend. I guess I will double-check when we reach 5 digits, but I can't afford my own time self-host it yet.
      - azemetre 1y ago
        Have you thought about possibly hiring a junior engineer to make the transition possible? I don't know what your use case but creating a solution that fits your needs would be worth it IMO. You're already spending a years worth of dev salary which can get you plenty of good talent around the world with.
- returnInfinity 1y ago
  They are definitely creating some value. Managed database.
- FloorEgg 1y ago
  Google bought firebase, so my guess is they are aiming for an Amazon or Microsoft acquisition.
- nikanj 1y ago
  The greater fool strategy has worked well for unprofitable tech companies for decades, and shows no signs of slowing down
- doctorpangloss 1y ago
  > Are they sustainable long term as a standalone business? Was Meteor? They are exactly the same thing. And I really liked Meteor! To me, the more money pouring in, the better. That said: https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRCVKYRSrhtTGuICRFuZaKKMrP5F5KsbnZkvA&s https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRCVKYR... (The Silicon Valley Economy cartoon)
- fsndz 1y ago
  and setting up postgresql on a simple VPS is so easy... You can literally ask Gemini 2.5 Pro or o3 or Sonnet 3.7 and do it in 15-30 minutes... Learned helplessness is really something and vibe coding is overrated imo: https://www.lycee.ai/blog/why-vibe-coding-is-overrated https://www.lycee.ai/blog/why-vibe-coding-is-overrated
  - chasd00 1y ago
    i'm a bit brain fried right now but are you being sarcastic? typing out apt-get install postgresql is a lot less that 15-30min.
    - alex23478 1y ago
      Yes, but setting up e.g. users and pg_hba might be something you would need to research before doing your first postgres deployment even if you previously came from a managed postgres service. Also coming up some sort of backup strategy would be a good idea. But once you know these things, you could of course be faster.
- mrweasel 1y ago
  To be fair, their $2B valuation is probably the most reasonable valuation we've seen in years. That doesn't negate the question of how they plan to turn a profit. If they truly have 3.5 million databases, that's only ~$500 per database to recoup the investments, that doesn't seem to crazy. Companies like OpenAI or Twitter/X are never going to be profitable enough to cover what they've already spend/cost. Supabase could because the amount is so much lower and they have paying customer, but I'd like to emphasize the "could".
- NoTeslaThrow 1y ago
  "ROI? Return on Investment?" "No, Radio on the Internet."
zhoujianfu 1y ago
I always felt like they’re the database dogman would use.
- sophrocyne 1y ago
  Time to vibe code the data into "That supa awesome database over there"
- jedberg 1y ago
  As someone with a seven year old, I appreciated this. Thank you.
film42 1y ago
Is the new valuation multiplier number of developers on platform instead of revenue? Valuing at $1000/developer is kind of insane. Valuing at $570/database is also nuts. It's a cool product but I hope the founders can find a win in what must be a pretty cramped cap table.
- candiddevmike 1y ago
  Their series C was in September 2024!
- acrooks 1y ago
  Their 2024 revenue was estimated at $16.8M [1] and $10.5M in 2023. If you extrapolate that growth rate +1 year you can assume it's now $26.9M. Another source estimates it at $15M in 2025 [2]. So if you assume their revenue is in that range, you're looking at 66x to 133x ARR multiple. In today's market that's quite a big markup. Standard SaaS right now is probably more like 5-15x. AI is a lot more (but Supabase isn't AI). But they are a key leader in their market, so probably get a meaningful bonus for that. And I'm sure a lot of big industry investors were competing against each other for the Supabase deal, so that definitely would have helped valuation too. Also, at their maturity today, they are probably showing some great success signing big enterprise deals and telling a story about how that will grow. That being said, those factors alone don't answer 66-133x. Perhaps Supabase's strongest angle is their opportunity for product-led growth: - They have a huge number of people on a free tier - The growth rate of free tier users might be accelerating - The conversion rate of free tier users to paid users might also be increasing - They're adding more things that people can pay for, increasing LTV of customers. e.g., for my business, we probably 20x our Supabase cost in the last 6 months - most of that is due to our growth but also there are a lot of things we can buy from Supabase beyond compute. So I would assume, in addition to the above, they're telling a story about their actual revenue growth rate will accelerate meaningfully because of all of these factors working together. Lots of assumptions in here, but you can start to see how a lot of different factors + a hype multiple could lead to such a valuation. [1] https://getlatka.com/companies/supabase.com#revenue https://getlatka.com/companies/supabase.com#revenue [2] https://leadiq.com/c/supabase/5ed1e4778a998f161ef62998 https://leadiq.com/c/supabase/5ed1e4778a998f161ef62998
Mortiffer 1y ago
Why do they bring up vibe coding here. They are just a firebase alternative and Google has way superior ai code gen tools
- lionkor 1y ago
  My guess is that they got that insane overvaluation because they sold themselves as an AI company
  - ru552 1y ago
    My humble guess is they sold themselves as the enabler for the AI vibe coding "revolution"
- justanotheratom 1y ago
  Supabase is quite well integrated with vibe coding tools - cursor, replit, v0, etc. I agree that Firebase is a superior well-integrated product, but IMO the vibes are on Supabase side.
- deleted 1y ago
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zefhous 1y ago
Oof this bit is rough! > The startup supports Postgres, the most popular developer database system that’s an alternative to Google’s Firebase. Supabase’s goal: To be a one-stop backend for developers and "vibe coders."
- rychco 1y ago
  I don't necessarily think this is a bad goal, but the term "vibe coder" is almost certainly considered derogatory now.
  - koakuma-chan 1y ago
    The day before yesterday I got a technical assignment from a company I was interviewing with to build a Next.js app. Normally I would build it myself, but that day it just felt so tedious, so I gave Claude Code a try. To my surprise, with little to no guidance (probably cuz it was React), it built the app and it even looked very similar to mock-ups the company gave. I changed some things here and there and submitted the task. The whole thing was done in about half an hour. Yesterday they emailed me to schedule the next interview. I'm hooked.
    - vrosas 1y ago
      Sadly it seems the days of take home interview assignments are numbered. I much preferred them to live coding assessments when given the option.
      - tptacek 1y ago
        We still do take-homes. You just design them assuming people are going to use LLMs. They're going to do that on the job anyways, so why tie a hand behind their back?
        whstl 1y ago
        Same. We just ask people to explain what they delivered, and this is 1000x better and more interesting than any quiz or whiteboard.
9283409232 1y ago
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- lionkor 1y ago
  It's when an unskilled laborer sits down and asks the AI to write code, but as a business model.
- jppope 1y ago
  Just let the AI code... don't worry about code bloat performance, security, data model, etc, just let it keep going and fixing the errors it makes.
- dankobgd 1y ago
  some trash that stupid people do
- pluto_modadic 1y ago
  It lets someone write code rapidly they don't understand and can't check. As the saying goes, "debugging is at least twice as hard as writing something", so if you write something you barely understand, you CERTAINLY can't debug it when it breaks.
- mhitza 1y ago
  It's a fun afternoon experiment. Grab some editor with free credits (I tried cursor) and ask the language model via chat to build the app. Accept all changes, check results, repeat. Fully immersing myself to the vibe it took me somewhere between 1-2 hours to have the AI loop in an endless ~"i fixed the issue" message while I kept telling it that the thing is still broken. Pretty fun when it works, but don't buy the hype that products are built exclusively with this strategy (though claims are out there that really like to make it seem so).
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enescakir 1y ago
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- koakuma-chan 1y ago
  Are you implying that Postgres has bad docs?
- deleted 1y ago
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jameslk 1y ago
Raising a very late funding stage in the private market to avoid an IPO in the violent public market I presume? I’m guessing this is the new startup norm for a while, along with reducing burn or exiting at a big discount if not just dying Nevertheless congrats to the Supabase team!
- vrosas 1y ago
  Execs cashing out some of their shares to buy houses in Tahoe while the stock market is in the red.
hackitup7 1y ago
I'm sure that a lot of the l33t h4x0rs here think that Supabase sucks and is only for amateurs but I'll say that as a former engineer who's getting back into building fun side projects again, Supabase has been incredible and just what I wanted. It's my favorite new product that I've started using in the last year. I hope they build out an enormous TAM of people who don't want to live inside a terminal and make a ton of money.
- nprateem 1y ago
  It's all fun and games until you need caching - something that comes at unspecified cost from when I looked into it.
- sebastiennight 1y ago
  I was looking for this comment. A non-technical family member is working on a tech project, and giving them Lovable.dev with Supabase as a backend was like complete magic. No amount of fiddling with terminals or propping up postgres is too little. We technical people always underestimate how fast things change when non-technical users can finally get things done without opening the hood.
  - giantrobot 1y ago
    > We technical people always underestimate how fast things change when non-technical users can finally get things done without opening the hood. This is good and bad. Non-technical users throwing up a prototype quickly is good. Non-technical users pushing that prototype into production with its security holes and non-obvious bugs is bad. It's easy for non-technical users to get a false sense of confidence if the thing they make looks good. This has been true since the RAD days of Delphi and VisualBasic.
    - sally_glance 1y ago
      Knowing the industry I'm pretty sure they will all push those AI prototypes to production - because they did the same with non-AI prototypes before. Now the question is once they inevitably pull in experienced folk for maintenance, refactoring and debugging, will it be easier or harder than working with that retired solo devs spaghetti codebase?
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k2xl 1y ago
I've been a lukewarm user of Supabase for my side projects. Unfortunately the amount of work to get off of it has been too high for me to leave. The major issue is - cost. It is way more expensive than I realized as they have so many little ways they charge you. It's almost like death by thousands of paper cuts. My bill for my app with just a few thousand users was $70 last month. I do like the tooling and all, but the pricing has been very confusing.
- jamil7 1y ago
  Kind of the same feeling, I don't use all of services they offer either and when I looked at self-hosting, it all seemed kind of heavy and fragile to self-host. I ended up replicating the parts I used with a small API layer connected to a managed postgres db for a tenth of the cost or something. I'd say it's pretty handy for prototyping but not sure I'd want to build a business on the back of it.
- cpursley 1y ago
  > just a few thousand users was $70 last month. Few Thousand!?! Sound very reasonable to me. Monetize just two of those users at $35 per month and your server costs are covered. Or run it yourself, there's a lot of moving parts but it's all open source.
  - Capricorn2481 1y ago
    > Few Thousand!?! Sound very reasonable to me. Monetize just two of those users at $35 per month and your server costs are covered That's one way to look at it, but compared to any other way to run a server, it's objectively terrible. You can serve that many users with a $5 box.
    - cpursley 1y ago
      So put Supabase on a $5 box or build out your own replacement backend if your time is that cheap.
      - 1y ago
rvz 1y ago
I'm from the future again, and I predict that either Replicate or fal.ai will get acquired by one of these so-called 'Vibe-coding' companies. Supabase included. When I see valuations like this, they are overvalued until they use that money to acquire another company for a total addressable market expansion.
- ilrwbwrkhv 1y ago
  It's really sad that nobody is actually trying to be a real company these days. When Steve Jobs was asked that if he will ever sell Apple, he physically recoiled and scolded the person asking such things. Nowadays, all of these companies are being set up just to be acquired. Nobody has any ambition anymore to be long lasting, profitable and an actual business.
  - cab11150904 1y ago
    So basically the nobody wants to work of the business longevity world? What is the actual difference? If their goal is profitability and eventually retirement why not do it on an accelerated timescale and exit with millions in their 30s instead of hundreds of thousands in their 70s?
- ru552 1y ago
  I think FAL is already too big for a "viber" company to buy. $55M ARR and 10%+ EBITDA. They're either going to IPO or get acquihired by a big 4.
  - peterldowns 1y ago
    FAL team is the real deal, they will absolutely not get acquired by any of these other "vibes" companies.
tengbretson 1y ago
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desireco42 1y ago
I love Supabase, but this seems to be the sign they will not be available in next 2-3 years. Or get acquired by someone. I don't think this is a good sign.
inside_story 1y ago
please fix the drizzle- --> supabase integration.
- cpursley 1y ago
  What's even the point of using drizzle with supabase? Isn't the entire point of supabase PostgREST and convenience tooling around it?
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kaladin_1 1y ago
Congrats team! I was a speaker in a local Supabase event just few weeks ago, https://shorturl.at/JwWMk https://shorturl.at/JwWMk. We had a local event in Abuja, Nigeria. There we promoted their Launch Week 14 series, highlighting new features from Supabase. In reality, it became an event to show people how to bootstrap a quick backend for their SME business in a weekend.
awb 1y ago
A recent project on HN declared Supabase dead: https://www.isthistechdead.com/supabase https://www.isthistechdead.com/supabase While the funding is impressive, I haven’t come across too many people touting Supabase or using it in production.
- atonse 1y ago
  We had a pretty bad experience with it on a NextJS app and had to gut it out (I decided not to charge the client for this multi-week refactoring effort to pull out Supabase since it was upon my recommendation that they went with Supabase, so that decision actually cost us thousands of dollars). It is good to get started and no doubt useful for simple CRUD apps. But once you want to start doing more complicated stuff, a lot of the RLS primitives become very hard to maintain and test, for example. You could say that that's Postgres's fault, but Supabase strongly pushes you in that direction. The tooling, while looking quite polished, just felt pretty half baked along with docs (at least a year ago when we pulled the plug). Try to implement even a halfway complicated permissions scheme with it and RLS and you are in for a world of hurt and seemingly unmaintainable code. So we ditched Supabase Auth for AuthJS, and are using vanilla postgres with Prisma. That's worked well for us. All the tooling is relatively mature, it's easy to write tests, etc. Maybe if AI is writing some of the code, it might get easier, but for now, I'm avoiding Supabase like the plague until I see a project that's relatively complex that's actually easy to maintain.
  - herpdyderp 1y ago
    Nice to see others using Prisma in the wild! Prisma is the first ORM I've ever used (after decades of trials) that I actually enjoy using.
  - wyck 1y ago
    Agree, also the logging is very limited across the board,, database functions are impossible to debug without good logging, I think a lot of people don't realize its not a direct copy of Postgres, for the cloud version several Postgres functions are disabled by default.
- 1y ago
999900000999 1y ago
>Supabase is currently used by two million developers who manage more than 3.5 million databases. The startup supports Postgres, the most popular developer database system that’s an alternative to Google’s Firebase. Supabase’s goal: To be a one-stop backend for developers and "vibe coders." How many of those users are paid. You can sign up for free without a credit card. It's cool, for certain use cases. I ended up trying it for a few months before switching to Django. If you ONLY need to store data behind some authentication, and handle everything else on the frontend, it's great. Once you need to try some serverside logic it gets weird. I'm open to being wrong, but I found firebase phenomenally more polished and easier to work with particularly when you get to firebase functions compared to edge functions. Self hosting requires magical tricks, it's clearly not a focus for them right now. I hope they keep the free tier intact. While it's not perfect, if your in a situation where you can spend absolutely no money you can easily use it learning ( or for portfolio piece).
- scosman 1y ago
  It’s normal Postgres. There’s no need to handle everything on the front end. The tutorials nudge you to learn RLS and use their SDKs for the client, but you can write perfectly normal server side code as well.
  - teaearlgraycold 1y ago
    Yeah I’ve ran a small project where I just did everything with the “service account” credentials which operates like a normal Postgres connection.
    - balls187 1y ago
      If you're not supporting users, it's fine. But if you usecase involves Supabase auth, using a service account to bypass RLS is kind of like hardcoding connection strings.
      - scosman 1y ago
        You can use both properly and together. The service account should only be accessed on the service. If using Auth+Server, you can check the verified user identity via Auth JWTs (or something, see the docs). Yeah, don't use the server connection on the client, but they have many warnings against that.
sergiotapia 1y ago
I don't quite understand the high valuation. I use Supabase for the database and file storage (legacy choice). But those seem interchangeable. Are people using many many more features, if so how?
ilrwbwrkhv 1y ago
This seems like another one of those VC companies which gets pushed by the VCs to the other companies in their portfolios as a probable integration point. The whole growth of vibe coding really did help them because I don't think actual developers use it because putting things like functions in the database and authorization in the database is something that we learnt a few decades ago is a bad idea. So I would guess they are used by massive amounts of developers who are new to coding or do not fully know how to code, but are becoming developers and who love the free databases Supabase provides. Would love to know what is their actual revenu.
- fasbiner 1y ago
  > The whole growth of vibe coding really did help them because I don't think actual developers use it because putting things like functions in the database and authorization in the database is something that we learnt a few decades ago is a bad idea. Why are those things a bad ideas? You could be right but if you insist on making value judgements without explanation or elaboration, you're going to sound like a whiny old crank who is scared of becoming obsolete.
  - ilrwbwrkhv 1y ago
    What I mean is that, you know, we tried all of these things back in the day. Like putting your business logic in a database was something that was tried. It's not that the first time that these ideas have shown up. And they were basically tried and tested and found faulty. But now there's this whole new generation of sub-bar developers. And they are being fooled into thinking that all of this works because they just want to get their hands dirty. I guess when normies flood the scene the wolves make a killing.
codingwagie 1y ago
Personally think that supabase and vercel are giving AWS a run for their money, and will start to eat into their market share. The developer experience is far superior to AWS, in a way that cannot be argued away by AWS handling "more complexity and scale". Supabase/Vercerl products are superior to large cloud providers, and while they target a narrower aspect of the tech stack, and to smaller customers, they will expand into more enterprise as their users grow. AWS needs to get their act together and start prioritizing developer experience Also, supabase is looking like the go to database for ai created apps. Which will be a major tailwind
- gabinator 1y ago
  I think large companies/gov contractors will still prioritize compliance and control systems over DX. And I believe both Supabase and Vercel run all their services on AWS anyways, so AWS gets paid no matter what.
- xmorse 1y ago
  Both use AWS under the hood
  - codingwagie 1y ago
    point still stands
    - ru552 1y ago
      How are they giving AWS a run for their money when they use AWS for their own service? AWS profits from Supabase growth.
      - codingwagie 1y ago
        AWS is unusable in alot of cases.
        5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV 1y ago
wg0 1y ago
Another heroku in the making. Also - where do these millions go? All into engineering?
xmorse 1y ago
Imagine being a Postgres developer and getting 1% of that while being the core technology powering all these startups
- tristan957 1y ago
  Most of the heavy hitters in Postgres development are already sponsored by companies to do their work. Supabase has at least one Postgres committer on staff for instance.
h1fra 1y ago
Not to be negative, but that seems super huge for its worth. How can you even recoup that with barely anyone paying? Founders trying to exit is comprehensible, but how can VCs sign this deal?
- rozap 1y ago
  I don't really understand supabase. Everyone talks about how great it is, but it's just slow expensive postgres? I must be missing something.
  - nikanj 1y ago
    It's slow expensive postgres _with_AI_
  - ChadNauseam 1y ago
    It has a nice web interface, comes with support for auth (which almost all apps need), and has a couple other nice things like storage buckets and serverless functions. When doing a hobby project, I don't want to rent a server from hetzner, set up SSH, connect, figure out how to install postgres, make sure everything is configured and so on. It's much nicer to click one button in the supabase UI and have everything I need
  - nmfisher 1y ago
    I'm a happy Supabase customer. It's not just postgres, it's postgres + auth + functions + storage all in one place, with a very good local Docker environment and a variety of nice client SDKs. It's a quick/convenient way to get a "full" backend up and running. The other option (Firebase) can't be self-hosted and has some absurd pricing footguns.
asim 1y ago
Congratulations to anyone who can raise $200m, let alone have the VCs fly around the world to make it happen.
jordanmorgan10 1y ago
The only that hasn't changed in this industry is that engineers apparently can't stand new, green beginners getting into the field. "They ship buggy, insecure messes" "They don't know how to fix what AI gave them" etc etc etc Right. Like that same thing hasn't been happening literally during the entire existence of programming. I, for one, welcome the vibe coders. I hope it grows their interest in the field and encourages them to go deeper and learn more. Will some be lazy and not even try? Of course! Will some get curious and learn the ins and outs? Absolutely.
factsaresacred 1y ago
Crazy that devs choose supabase and vercel when Google Cloud is right there. Google were late to the game but they've built perhaps one of the easiest cloud platforms to work with.
- bze12 1y ago
  Do you use firebase?
daemonk 1y ago
[flagged]
- GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
  i dont want to listen to uninformed "AI-generated" music any more than i want to support uninformed "AI-generated" code
  - daemonk 1y ago
    Sure. But it's not really about you. I wouldn't break into someone's house and tell them they painted their house an uninformed color. If something sucks or won't scale, it will sort itself out in the market.
    - GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
      > I wouldn't break into someone's house and tell them they painted their house an uninformed color. but if you, an experienced professional painter, were hired to repaint somebody's house, and that person used bad paint (or something else entirely, like... i dunno, shellac, or white glue), your scope of work changes from "light prep and paint" to a much more involved job of undoing the previous work (or mistakes) and then getting to the original scope of work. > If something sucks or won't scale, it will sort itself out in the market. i truly don't mean this in a derogatory way but that sounds incredibly naive.
      - daemonk 1y ago
        I don’t think we are going to agree on this. At the end of the day we are really just disagreeing on how seriously we should take AI-ification of software engineering. I take a lighter stance that it’s mostly harmless and has a lot of educational positives. I guess you foresee a lot of potential harm. I do appreciate people who are willing to be the canary in the coal mine. I just find that a lot of the criticism appears to be more gatekeeping than legitimate worries.
hfgjbcgjbvg 1y ago
The new age is back
frankfrank13 1y ago
A lot of comments seem to take issue with Supabase being aligned to Vibe-coding, which is understandable, but I do think it's related! I think vibe-coding could very well be a real market-force, and as best as I can tell it exists within a specific type of tech circle. No one is vibe coding Elixir, no one is vibe coding Rust, people are vibe coding React + Node/Python, and more specifically I think people are watching streamers and YT videos on hot-new-frameworks-near-you and want to try them out! Supabase is absolutely a darling of this tech-circle, and I think a few other companies could be as well: 1. oxc (oxlint) 2. vercel 3. fly.io probably more! and more every day
- doctorpangloss 1y ago
  New frameworks don't align with vibe coding at all, because they are poorly represented in OpenAI, Anthropic & Google's datasets.
  - jedberg 1y ago
    But you can just give them a prompt to teach them. Case in point, Transact has a prompt that you can put into an LLM that enables it to one-shot some simple programs: https://github.com/dbos-inc/dbos-docs/blob/main/docs/python/prompting.md https://github.com/dbos-inc/dbos-docs/blob/main/docs/python/...
- curiouser3 1y ago
  >no one is vibe coding elixir I did :) I made a browser-based MMO with Phoenix to test out liveview and learn the language: https://shopkeep.gg https://shopkeep.gg And it was pretty annoying. Elixir doesn't really lend itself to vibe coding due to namespacing and aliasing of modules, pattern matching, all without static typing (I know, Dialyzer...). It also struggles to understand the difference between LiveComponents and LiveViews, where to send/handle messages between layers. Without references to filenames, the agent perpetually decides "this doesn't exist, so I'll write it :)". I found it to be pretty challenging before figuring out I could force the agent to run `mix xref callers <Some.Module>` when trying to do cross-module refs. (caveat: this was all with claude 3.5 sonnet)
- 1y ago
siliconc0w 1y ago
I've been testing out PostgREST, RLS, and PL/pgSQL functions for a new app and I'm not wild about it. It's pretty complicated to grok the permission model, it's awkward to load up your DB with logic, and the LLMs kinda suck at reliably generating working queries, policies, functions, etc. So I'm not really convinced it's ideal for 'vibe coders'.
zkmon 1y ago
I'm sure the team might not be expecting this level of valuation. These trends won't last long. Make hay while the hype shines. Who knows how soon people would forget that there was something called vibe-coding and a back-end development.
jbs789 1y ago
As an observation, the quotations and the article itself doesn’t appear very thoughtful or well reasoned. It sounds more like a VC wanted a big deal (or at least to represent it as such) and made a bet, invited his buddies(?) along, and the company has seen a recent bump from “vibe coding”. Some allusion to Larry Ellison. Very light on information to form an opinion…
crowcroft 1y ago
I'm convinced the only profitable market for these DB companies is enterprise. Either that or they need to add features and products alongside the DB to essentially replace the likes of Vercel. Having said that Supabase is probably the best 'cloud DB' I've played around with so hope they succeed.
joshdavham 1y ago
> The startup supports Postgres, the most popular developer database system that’s an alternative to Google’s Firebase I've always taken issue with branding Supabase as an alternative to Firebase. Firebase is a PaaS whereas Supabase is more of a BaaS.
- chaosprint 1y ago
  can you explain more?
  - joshdavham 1y ago
    While Supabase does support many equivalent Firebase features like a database, auth, functions, storage, etc, Supabase doesn't support website hosting whereas Firebase does. Supabase is mainly for backend stuff (BaaS) whereas Firebase is for both frontend and backend (PaaS). To get the equivalent functionality of Firebase, you'd need to add something like Netlify or Vercel to pair it with your Supabase backend.
- DidYaWipe 1y ago
  Whatever those are.
unhappy_meaning 1y ago
And the decline of a good product begins because it will be all about profits for board members going forward...
- constantlm 1y ago
  To be fair this is a series D
saxelsen 1y ago
$2B valuation at $16M revenue sounds nuts.. My prediction: They're banking on a big exit to OpenAI or Claude as the defacto backend for an AI IDE. They're the only big alternative to Firebase, and Firebase just got pulled into Google AI Studio.
- dangoodmanUT 1y ago
  where did you get 16M revenue?
  - saxelsen 1y ago
    Someone else mentioned it in the comments. A quick google gives some websites that estimates their revenue to that within +/- 5M
sailfast 1y ago
The thing I believe least in this article is that the investor is betting their career on this investment. Maybe they think that, but they’re still multi-millionaires making bets with other people’s money. They’ll be fine.
- jbs789 1y ago
  Hehe he’s signalling his high conviction to get those in after him and keep the valuation rising!
radicaldreamer 1y ago
Retool uses Supabase for its out of the box database setup
- truetraveller 1y ago
  Proof? Highly doubt this.
hfgjbcgjbvg 1y ago
Good for them. They get so much hate online I think because it’s such a “why didn’t I think of that” idea. People are jealous of their success I feel.
socketcluster 1y ago
I built a 'serverless' platform that's similar, smaller but more focus on low-code than Supabase https://saasufy.com/ https://saasufy.com/ All the components are declarative HTML and update in realtime. Similar concept as HTMX but doesn't require any backend code. You can still implement complex UX, authentication, access control and filtered views (indexing and all). I built this app with it over a few months as a weekend project: https://www.insnare.net/app/#/onboarding/country/All https://www.insnare.net/app/#/onboarding/country/All
- beeman 1y ago
  A 'serverless' platform that's "similiar". But not open source, and uses a token to 'own a piece of it'? Care to explain what the idea behind this is and where you see the similarities?
gitroom 1y ago
Nice, I gotta admit, I like seeing new stuff get funded like this - but man, whenever I read about crazy big rounds, I start wondering how these companies ever make real money vs just chasing hype till the next exit. Always makes me think about what actually lasts long term besides just burn and churn.
xyz_suspended 1y ago
[dead]
revskill 1y ago
Supabase lacks doc, gitops.
6stringmerc 1y ago
Named after a Nicki Minaj song…what could go wrong? Just no concern whatsoever for creators or their brands. SupaCringe but not like I can do anything about it.

342 points by baristaGeek 1y ago

Congrats to Anthony and the team! What an amazing milestone.

That’s a lot of money. What’s Supabase’s exit strategy? Are they sustainable long term as a standalone business? You can also see how money is starting to chase “vibe coding” — as long as you say the magic words, even if your product is only tangentially related to it, you can get funding!

9283409232 1y ago
Acquisition. All of these VC companies raise unsustainable levels of money in hopes of acquisition or IPO. Supabase seems to be leaning towards acquisition.
candiddevmike 1y ago
Reading the tea leaves, Series D means they opted for more funding vs IPO. They claim to have 2 million users, but they're open core so how many are paying? Maybe their books aren't looking that great. Wall street doesn't understand database vendors outside of "big data", so they're probably hoping for acquisition. Not sure who would buy them though, as PostgreSQL vendors are kind of a dime-a-dozen these days...
- clvx 1y ago
  If lovable, bolt.new, etc kept integrating with them, that's a money maker without needing to do much sales. There's a wave of AI tools that require somehow save state and Supabase provides that. I'm absolutely amazed others haven't jumped in the same ship yet.
  - philomath_mn 1y ago
    That definitely seems to be the play. Keep funneling in users from Lovable/bolt.new and keep building revenue or hope to be acquired if one of those vibe coding tools gets huge.
  - StrandedKitty 1y ago
    In the short term yes, but why would you as an end user of lovable and similar tools prefer expensive Supabase? If you already have an AI developer at your disposal you might as well make it figure out how to properly set up and maintain AWS, right? Maybe it can't do it now -- too complicated because there's no simple AI-accessible interface, and LLM models are simply not smart enough yet, but I imagine it will change soon.
- adamnemecek 1y ago
  > Not sure who would buy them though, as PostgreSQL vendors are kind of a dime-a-dozen these days... Supabase defo has a much higher mindshare.
  - TechDebtDevin 1y ago
    Sure but ultimately they're still just selling something that is already free and wrapping AWS. These business models aren't sustainable unless you trash your free product, which also isn't sustainable. Presumably they have a good deal with their cloud vendor, AWS I think, but I think its safe to assume they lose A LOT on their free products.
    - adamnemecek 1y ago
      The whole premise of cloud hosting businesses is that people don't want to manage stuff themselves.
      - hirako2000 1y ago
        They end up managing stuff themselves anyway. Plus managing another kind of bills.
        adamnemecek 1y ago
        AWS seems to be doing fine.
- firtoz 1y ago
  A lot are paying, including me for multiple projects. They have a pretty good offering. I used to use them for dev and prod, but now using neon for dev. Supabase still for prod. I had switched from mongo to supabase. I may switch to neon for prod but not in a rush. They also offer so much more than just postgres. Though I use them only for postgres myself.
  - drewnick 1y ago
    Since you use both supabase and neon, any particular strength or weakness to keep supabase for prod? I just moved my app to neon today (easy enough to test it!) and am enjoying the auto-scaling features and UI is great on neon. But I'm curious about how supabase stacks up.
    - firtoz 1y ago
      Supabase feels less flexible. Also it tries to do many other things so I don't think they can focus fully on the db side. However it still works well enough for production so cannot complain too much. I haven't done benchmarks for performance latency etc though. I should!
- BoorishBears 1y ago
  > so how many are paying This is like if Google Spanner were open sourced tomorrow morning: realistically how many people are going to learn how to deploy a thing that was built by Google for Google to serve an ultra-specific persona? Maybe you might get some Amazon-sized whale peeking at it for bits to improve their own product, but the entire value prop is that it's a managed service: you're probably going to continue paying for it to be managed for you.
  - badestrand 1y ago
    IMO it also depends on how the whole process is tied together. I always loved Vercel for their easy hosting of Next.js with included CI/CD, but I recently switched to self-hosting - their pricing switched from a flat, worry-free $20/month to an unpredictable whatever-it-may-cost plus it sent me 10+ emails every single month about hitting some quotas that they introduced and I couldn't find a good way to stop that.
- tschellenbach 1y ago
  it's an aggressive preemptive round, so i'd guess 2b/50 = 40M of revenue. Probably low margins since the free tier/ hosting postgres nature of the business.
- alp1n3_eth 1y ago
  A lot of people don't self-host it, even though it is open core. This is due to their docs being garbage and tons of differences between the offerings, so you can't even rely on the main docs if you're self-hosting. It's easier to just become familiar with a DB UI tool like Beekeeper or DataGrip and spin up your own things. I'm also not a huge fan of being "locked-in" to so many things (including their auth). I think most projects would be better off keeping these parts separated, even if they are using third-party services to handle them, as it would be way less overhead to migrate out.
colesantiago 1y ago
> What’s Supabase’s exit strategy? Are they sustainable long term as a standalone business? Acquisition best case, Private Equity worst case. Do you see Supabase going public on the stock market? Perhaps unless they do what Cloudflare done and are replicating AWS, it may be hard to see a stock market debut. Could be wrong though.
- fakedang 1y ago
  Supabase is basically AWS Postgres under the hood. It's popular amongst hobbyists and small teams but I'm not sure whether any large teams actively use it. Once you're past the point of serious business, it's much more cost effective to host everything by yourself.
  - lillecarl 1y ago
    What is serious business? I think supabase can scale brilliantly, and it doesn't lock you in, if you have need for some special infra you can build and integrate it, I don't know but you could possibly even use FDW to access a postgres you run yourself. Also they can't run on AWS postgres with all their postgres plug-ins AFAIK. The point of "cheaper to host everything yourself" is a lot higher than what most estimate. My only concern is that is supabase goes out of business or go evil you're gonna have a bad time, however everything is open-source
    - fakedang 1y ago
      Serious business is when you need to maintain uptime and stability. Not just me, but a lot of folks on the Supabase reddit have complained often about the insane downtimes that we've experienced at times with the platform. I would 100% use it for prototypes and MVPs, but for production? Neither me nor a lot of others would touch it with a pole, even though I'm sure your experience might be different.
  - ZiiS 1y ago
    Supabase at is minimum providing a PostgreSQL server, pooler (they started on pgbouncer, how their own) and a PostREST API, and support, backup, logging etc. You can be doing serious business and not have the time/people to run these reliably self-hosted. They also provide Auth almost to the Auth0 level and Edge functions like Vercel, S3 like storage (sharing the db's permission system), and websocket/presence backed by Elixir. TBH they are a compelling value, at least for us.
diggan 1y ago
> Are they sustainable long term as a standalone business? It's bananas to me that questions like these could be unanswered even 5 years after the business started. This possibly cannot be the most efficient way for finding new solutions and "disrupting" stale industries?
- jsheard 1y ago
  > It's bananas to me that questions like these could be unanswered even 5 years after the business started. Those are rookie numbers, Discord is coming up on 10 years old and has made zero dollars to date, yet is supposedly considering an IPO soon.
  - hashamali 1y ago
    Discord has a fairly successful subscription product that is generating tens of millions in revenue. They most certainly have made more than 0 dollars. Profitable? Less likely.
    - jsheard 1y ago
      Yeah I meant zero profit, poor wording on my part.
  - bombcar 1y ago
    The IPO is how (the shareholders) make money, by selling to bagholders.
  - vecter 1y ago
    It's very common for tech companies to go public without being profitable. As long as their growth is good and they have a reasonable story for how they will achieve profitability, then it typically makes sense. Of course every company is different and not all will reach their profitability goals post-IPO, but in many cases, it wouldn't make sense to wait for profitability before going public.
    - 1y ago
lionkor 1y ago
What an absolute joke. Their exit strategy is presumably to keep chasing the high and find more ways to integrate AI. The era of building good software for fun and profit is coming to an end.
- lillecarl 1y ago
  I think their product is sound, they build essentially a backend as a service platform on open-source software. That doesn't make it easy to run at scale, so you probably wanna use their paid offering unless you plan to hire a lot of staff to maintain it, but it is possible and they support small scale dev envs
  - ZiiS 1y ago
    100% this; we have a 4 digit monthly spend. I guess I will double-check when we reach 5 digits, but I can't afford my own time self-host it yet.
    - azemetre 1y ago
      Have you thought about possibly hiring a junior engineer to make the transition possible? I don't know what your use case but creating a solution that fits your needs would be worth it IMO. You're already spending a years worth of dev salary which can get you plenty of good talent around the world with.
returnInfinity 1y ago
They are definitely creating some value. Managed database.
FloorEgg 1y ago
Google bought firebase, so my guess is they are aiming for an Amazon or Microsoft acquisition.
nikanj 1y ago
The greater fool strategy has worked well for unprofitable tech companies for decades, and shows no signs of slowing down
doctorpangloss 1y ago
> Are they sustainable long term as a standalone business? Was Meteor? They are exactly the same thing. And I really liked Meteor! To me, the more money pouring in, the better. That said: https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRCVKYRSrhtTGuICRFuZaKKMrP5F5KsbnZkvA&s https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRCVKYR... (The Silicon Valley Economy cartoon)
fsndz 1y ago
and setting up postgresql on a simple VPS is so easy... You can literally ask Gemini 2.5 Pro or o3 or Sonnet 3.7 and do it in 15-30 minutes... Learned helplessness is really something and vibe coding is overrated imo: https://www.lycee.ai/blog/why-vibe-coding-is-overrated https://www.lycee.ai/blog/why-vibe-coding-is-overrated
- chasd00 1y ago
  i'm a bit brain fried right now but are you being sarcastic? typing out apt-get install postgresql is a lot less that 15-30min.
  - alex23478 1y ago
    Yes, but setting up e.g. users and pg_hba might be something you would need to research before doing your first postgres deployment even if you previously came from a managed postgres service. Also coming up some sort of backup strategy would be a good idea. But once you know these things, you could of course be faster.
mrweasel 1y ago
To be fair, their $2B valuation is probably the most reasonable valuation we've seen in years. That doesn't negate the question of how they plan to turn a profit. If they truly have 3.5 million databases, that's only ~$500 per database to recoup the investments, that doesn't seem to crazy. Companies like OpenAI or Twitter/X are never going to be profitable enough to cover what they've already spend/cost. Supabase could because the amount is so much lower and they have paying customer, but I'd like to emphasize the "could".
NoTeslaThrow 1y ago
"ROI? Return on Investment?" "No, Radio on the Internet."

zhoujianfu 1y ago

I always felt like they’re the database dogman would use.

sophrocyne 1y ago
Time to vibe code the data into "That supa awesome database over there"
jedberg 1y ago
As someone with a seven year old, I appreciated this. Thank you.

film42 1y ago

Is the new valuation multiplier number of developers on platform instead of revenue? Valuing at $1000/developer is kind of insane. Valuing at $570/database is also nuts. It's a cool product but I hope the founders can find a win in what must be a pretty cramped cap table.

candiddevmike 1y ago
Their series C was in September 2024!
acrooks 1y ago
Their 2024 revenue was estimated at $16.8M [1] and $10.5M in 2023. If you extrapolate that growth rate +1 year you can assume it's now $26.9M. Another source estimates it at $15M in 2025 [2]. So if you assume their revenue is in that range, you're looking at 66x to 133x ARR multiple. In today's market that's quite a big markup. Standard SaaS right now is probably more like 5-15x. AI is a lot more (but Supabase isn't AI). But they are a key leader in their market, so probably get a meaningful bonus for that. And I'm sure a lot of big industry investors were competing against each other for the Supabase deal, so that definitely would have helped valuation too. Also, at their maturity today, they are probably showing some great success signing big enterprise deals and telling a story about how that will grow. That being said, those factors alone don't answer 66-133x. Perhaps Supabase's strongest angle is their opportunity for product-led growth: - They have a huge number of people on a free tier - The growth rate of free tier users might be accelerating - The conversion rate of free tier users to paid users might also be increasing - They're adding more things that people can pay for, increasing LTV of customers. e.g., for my business, we probably 20x our Supabase cost in the last 6 months - most of that is due to our growth but also there are a lot of things we can buy from Supabase beyond compute. So I would assume, in addition to the above, they're telling a story about their actual revenue growth rate will accelerate meaningfully because of all of these factors working together. Lots of assumptions in here, but you can start to see how a lot of different factors + a hype multiple could lead to such a valuation. [1] https://getlatka.com/companies/supabase.com#revenue https://getlatka.com/companies/supabase.com#revenue [2] https://leadiq.com/c/supabase/5ed1e4778a998f161ef62998 https://leadiq.com/c/supabase/5ed1e4778a998f161ef62998

Mortiffer 1y ago

Why do they bring up vibe coding here. They are just a firebase alternative and Google has way superior ai code gen tools

lionkor 1y ago
My guess is that they got that insane overvaluation because they sold themselves as an AI company
- ru552 1y ago
  My humble guess is they sold themselves as the enabler for the AI vibe coding "revolution"
justanotheratom 1y ago
Supabase is quite well integrated with vibe coding tools - cursor, replit, v0, etc. I agree that Firebase is a superior well-integrated product, but IMO the vibes are on Supabase side.
deleted 1y ago
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zefhous 1y ago

Oof this bit is rough! > The startup supports Postgres, the most popular developer database system that’s an alternative to Google’s Firebase. Supabase’s goal: To be a one-stop backend for developers and "vibe coders."

rychco 1y ago
I don't necessarily think this is a bad goal, but the term "vibe coder" is almost certainly considered derogatory now.
- koakuma-chan 1y ago
  The day before yesterday I got a technical assignment from a company I was interviewing with to build a Next.js app. Normally I would build it myself, but that day it just felt so tedious, so I gave Claude Code a try. To my surprise, with little to no guidance (probably cuz it was React), it built the app and it even looked very similar to mock-ups the company gave. I changed some things here and there and submitted the task. The whole thing was done in about half an hour. Yesterday they emailed me to schedule the next interview. I'm hooked.
  - vrosas 1y ago
    Sadly it seems the days of take home interview assignments are numbered. I much preferred them to live coding assessments when given the option.
    - tptacek 1y ago
      We still do take-homes. You just design them assuming people are going to use LLMs. They're going to do that on the job anyways, so why tie a hand behind their back?
      - whstl 1y ago
        Same. We just ask people to explain what they delivered, and this is 1000x better and more interesting than any quiz or whiteboard.

9283409232 1y ago

[flagged]

lionkor 1y ago
It's when an unskilled laborer sits down and asks the AI to write code, but as a business model.
jppope 1y ago
Just let the AI code... don't worry about code bloat performance, security, data model, etc, just let it keep going and fixing the errors it makes.
dankobgd 1y ago
some trash that stupid people do
pluto_modadic 1y ago
It lets someone write code rapidly they don't understand and can't check. As the saying goes, "debugging is at least twice as hard as writing something", so if you write something you barely understand, you CERTAINLY can't debug it when it breaks.
mhitza 1y ago
It's a fun afternoon experiment. Grab some editor with free credits (I tried cursor) and ask the language model via chat to build the app. Accept all changes, check results, repeat. Fully immersing myself to the vibe it took me somewhere between 1-2 hours to have the AI loop in an endless ~"i fixed the issue" message while I kept telling it that the thing is still broken. Pretty fun when it works, but don't buy the hype that products are built exclusively with this strategy (though claims are out there that really like to make it seem so).
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enescakir 1y ago

[flagged]

koakuma-chan 1y ago
Are you implying that Postgres has bad docs?
deleted 1y ago
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jameslk 1y ago

Raising a very late funding stage in the private market to avoid an IPO in the violent public market I presume? I’m guessing this is the new startup norm for a while, along with reducing burn or exiting at a big discount if not just dying Nevertheless congrats to the Supabase team!

vrosas 1y ago
Execs cashing out some of their shares to buy houses in Tahoe while the stock market is in the red.

hackitup7 1y ago

I'm sure that a lot of the l33t h4x0rs here think that Supabase sucks and is only for amateurs but I'll say that as a former engineer who's getting back into building fun side projects again, Supabase has been incredible and just what I wanted. It's my favorite new product that I've started using in the last year. I hope they build out an enormous TAM of people who don't want to live inside a terminal and make a ton of money.

nprateem 1y ago
It's all fun and games until you need caching - something that comes at unspecified cost from when I looked into it.
sebastiennight 1y ago
I was looking for this comment. A non-technical family member is working on a tech project, and giving them Lovable.dev with Supabase as a backend was like complete magic. No amount of fiddling with terminals or propping up postgres is too little. We technical people always underestimate how fast things change when non-technical users can finally get things done without opening the hood.
- giantrobot 1y ago
  > We technical people always underestimate how fast things change when non-technical users can finally get things done without opening the hood. This is good and bad. Non-technical users throwing up a prototype quickly is good. Non-technical users pushing that prototype into production with its security holes and non-obvious bugs is bad. It's easy for non-technical users to get a false sense of confidence if the thing they make looks good. This has been true since the RAD days of Delphi and VisualBasic.
  - sally_glance 1y ago
    Knowing the industry I'm pretty sure they will all push those AI prototypes to production - because they did the same with non-AI prototypes before. Now the question is once they inevitably pull in experienced folk for maintenance, refactoring and debugging, will it be easier or harder than working with that retired solo devs spaghetti codebase?

deleted 1y ago

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k2xl 1y ago

I've been a lukewarm user of Supabase for my side projects. Unfortunately the amount of work to get off of it has been too high for me to leave. The major issue is - cost. It is way more expensive than I realized as they have so many little ways they charge you. It's almost like death by thousands of paper cuts. My bill for my app with just a few thousand users was $70 last month. I do like the tooling and all, but the pricing has been very confusing.

jamil7 1y ago
Kind of the same feeling, I don't use all of services they offer either and when I looked at self-hosting, it all seemed kind of heavy and fragile to self-host. I ended up replicating the parts I used with a small API layer connected to a managed postgres db for a tenth of the cost or something. I'd say it's pretty handy for prototyping but not sure I'd want to build a business on the back of it.
cpursley 1y ago
> just a few thousand users was $70 last month. Few Thousand!?! Sound very reasonable to me. Monetize just two of those users at $35 per month and your server costs are covered. Or run it yourself, there's a lot of moving parts but it's all open source.
- Capricorn2481 1y ago
  > Few Thousand!?! Sound very reasonable to me. Monetize just two of those users at $35 per month and your server costs are covered That's one way to look at it, but compared to any other way to run a server, it's objectively terrible. You can serve that many users with a $5 box.
  - cpursley 1y ago
    So put Supabase on a $5 box or build out your own replacement backend if your time is that cheap.
    - 1y ago

rvz 1y ago

I'm from the future again, and I predict that either Replicate or fal.ai will get acquired by one of these so-called 'Vibe-coding' companies. Supabase included. When I see valuations like this, they are overvalued until they use that money to acquire another company for a total addressable market expansion.

ilrwbwrkhv 1y ago
It's really sad that nobody is actually trying to be a real company these days. When Steve Jobs was asked that if he will ever sell Apple, he physically recoiled and scolded the person asking such things. Nowadays, all of these companies are being set up just to be acquired. Nobody has any ambition anymore to be long lasting, profitable and an actual business.
- cab11150904 1y ago
  So basically the nobody wants to work of the business longevity world? What is the actual difference? If their goal is profitability and eventually retirement why not do it on an accelerated timescale and exit with millions in their 30s instead of hundreds of thousands in their 70s?
ru552 1y ago
I think FAL is already too big for a "viber" company to buy. $55M ARR and 10%+ EBITDA. They're either going to IPO or get acquihired by a big 4.
- peterldowns 1y ago
  FAL team is the real deal, they will absolutely not get acquired by any of these other "vibes" companies.

tengbretson 1y ago

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desireco42 1y ago

I love Supabase, but this seems to be the sign they will not be available in next 2-3 years. Or get acquired by someone. I don't think this is a good sign.

inside_story 1y ago

please fix the drizzle- --> supabase integration.

cpursley 1y ago
What's even the point of using drizzle with supabase? Isn't the entire point of supabase PostgREST and convenience tooling around it?

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kaladin_1 1y ago

Congrats team! I was a speaker in a local Supabase event just few weeks ago, https://shorturl.at/JwWMk https://shorturl.at/JwWMk. We had a local event in Abuja, Nigeria. There we promoted their Launch Week 14 series, highlighting new features from Supabase. In reality, it became an event to show people how to bootstrap a quick backend for their SME business in a weekend.

awb 1y ago

A recent project on HN declared Supabase dead: https://www.isthistechdead.com/supabase https://www.isthistechdead.com/supabase While the funding is impressive, I haven’t come across too many people touting Supabase or using it in production.

atonse 1y ago
We had a pretty bad experience with it on a NextJS app and had to gut it out (I decided not to charge the client for this multi-week refactoring effort to pull out Supabase since it was upon my recommendation that they went with Supabase, so that decision actually cost us thousands of dollars). It is good to get started and no doubt useful for simple CRUD apps. But once you want to start doing more complicated stuff, a lot of the RLS primitives become very hard to maintain and test, for example. You could say that that's Postgres's fault, but Supabase strongly pushes you in that direction. The tooling, while looking quite polished, just felt pretty half baked along with docs (at least a year ago when we pulled the plug). Try to implement even a halfway complicated permissions scheme with it and RLS and you are in for a world of hurt and seemingly unmaintainable code. So we ditched Supabase Auth for AuthJS, and are using vanilla postgres with Prisma. That's worked well for us. All the tooling is relatively mature, it's easy to write tests, etc. Maybe if AI is writing some of the code, it might get easier, but for now, I'm avoiding Supabase like the plague until I see a project that's relatively complex that's actually easy to maintain.
- herpdyderp 1y ago
  Nice to see others using Prisma in the wild! Prisma is the first ORM I've ever used (after decades of trials) that I actually enjoy using.
- wyck 1y ago
  Agree, also the logging is very limited across the board,, database functions are impossible to debug without good logging, I think a lot of people don't realize its not a direct copy of Postgres, for the cloud version several Postgres functions are disabled by default.
1y ago

999900000999 1y ago

>Supabase is currently used by two million developers who manage more than 3.5 million databases. The startup supports Postgres, the most popular developer database system that’s an alternative to Google’s Firebase. Supabase’s goal: To be a one-stop backend for developers and "vibe coders." How many of those users are paid. You can sign up for free without a credit card. It's cool, for certain use cases. I ended up trying it for a few months before switching to Django. If you ONLY need to store data behind some authentication, and handle everything else on the frontend, it's great. Once you need to try some serverside logic it gets weird. I'm open to being wrong, but I found firebase phenomenally more polished and easier to work with particularly when you get to firebase functions compared to edge functions. Self hosting requires magical tricks, it's clearly not a focus for them right now. I hope they keep the free tier intact. While it's not perfect, if your in a situation where you can spend absolutely no money you can easily use it learning ( or for portfolio piece).

scosman 1y ago
It’s normal Postgres. There’s no need to handle everything on the front end. The tutorials nudge you to learn RLS and use their SDKs for the client, but you can write perfectly normal server side code as well.
- teaearlgraycold 1y ago
  Yeah I’ve ran a small project where I just did everything with the “service account” credentials which operates like a normal Postgres connection.
  - balls187 1y ago
    If you're not supporting users, it's fine. But if you usecase involves Supabase auth, using a service account to bypass RLS is kind of like hardcoding connection strings.
    - scosman 1y ago
      You can use both properly and together. The service account should only be accessed on the service. If using Auth+Server, you can check the verified user identity via Auth JWTs (or something, see the docs). Yeah, don't use the server connection on the client, but they have many warnings against that.

sergiotapia 1y ago

I don't quite understand the high valuation. I use Supabase for the database and file storage (legacy choice). But those seem interchangeable. Are people using many many more features, if so how?

ilrwbwrkhv 1y ago

This seems like another one of those VC companies which gets pushed by the VCs to the other companies in their portfolios as a probable integration point. The whole growth of vibe coding really did help them because I don't think actual developers use it because putting things like functions in the database and authorization in the database is something that we learnt a few decades ago is a bad idea. So I would guess they are used by massive amounts of developers who are new to coding or do not fully know how to code, but are becoming developers and who love the free databases Supabase provides. Would love to know what is their actual revenu.

fasbiner 1y ago
> The whole growth of vibe coding really did help them because I don't think actual developers use it because putting things like functions in the database and authorization in the database is something that we learnt a few decades ago is a bad idea. Why are those things a bad ideas? You could be right but if you insist on making value judgements without explanation or elaboration, you're going to sound like a whiny old crank who is scared of becoming obsolete.
- ilrwbwrkhv 1y ago
  What I mean is that, you know, we tried all of these things back in the day. Like putting your business logic in a database was something that was tried. It's not that the first time that these ideas have shown up. And they were basically tried and tested and found faulty. But now there's this whole new generation of sub-bar developers. And they are being fooled into thinking that all of this works because they just want to get their hands dirty. I guess when normies flood the scene the wolves make a killing.

codingwagie 1y ago

Personally think that supabase and vercel are giving AWS a run for their money, and will start to eat into their market share. The developer experience is far superior to AWS, in a way that cannot be argued away by AWS handling "more complexity and scale". Supabase/Vercerl products are superior to large cloud providers, and while they target a narrower aspect of the tech stack, and to smaller customers, they will expand into more enterprise as their users grow. AWS needs to get their act together and start prioritizing developer experience Also, supabase is looking like the go to database for ai created apps. Which will be a major tailwind

gabinator 1y ago
I think large companies/gov contractors will still prioritize compliance and control systems over DX. And I believe both Supabase and Vercel run all their services on AWS anyways, so AWS gets paid no matter what.
xmorse 1y ago
Both use AWS under the hood
- codingwagie 1y ago
  point still stands
  - ru552 1y ago
    How are they giving AWS a run for their money when they use AWS for their own service? AWS profits from Supabase growth.
    - codingwagie 1y ago
      AWS is unusable in alot of cases.
      - 5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV 1y ago

wg0 1y ago

Another heroku in the making. Also - where do these millions go? All into engineering?

xmorse 1y ago

Imagine being a Postgres developer and getting 1% of that while being the core technology powering all these startups

tristan957 1y ago
Most of the heavy hitters in Postgres development are already sponsored by companies to do their work. Supabase has at least one Postgres committer on staff for instance.

h1fra 1y ago

Not to be negative, but that seems super huge for its worth. How can you even recoup that with barely anyone paying? Founders trying to exit is comprehensible, but how can VCs sign this deal?

rozap 1y ago
I don't really understand supabase. Everyone talks about how great it is, but it's just slow expensive postgres? I must be missing something.
- nikanj 1y ago
  It's slow expensive postgres _with_AI_
- ChadNauseam 1y ago
  It has a nice web interface, comes with support for auth (which almost all apps need), and has a couple other nice things like storage buckets and serverless functions. When doing a hobby project, I don't want to rent a server from hetzner, set up SSH, connect, figure out how to install postgres, make sure everything is configured and so on. It's much nicer to click one button in the supabase UI and have everything I need
- nmfisher 1y ago
  I'm a happy Supabase customer. It's not just postgres, it's postgres + auth + functions + storage all in one place, with a very good local Docker environment and a variety of nice client SDKs. It's a quick/convenient way to get a "full" backend up and running. The other option (Firebase) can't be self-hosted and has some absurd pricing footguns.

asim 1y ago

Congratulations to anyone who can raise $200m, let alone have the VCs fly around the world to make it happen.

jordanmorgan10 1y ago

The only that hasn't changed in this industry is that engineers apparently can't stand new, green beginners getting into the field. "They ship buggy, insecure messes" "They don't know how to fix what AI gave them" etc etc etc Right. Like that same thing hasn't been happening literally during the entire existence of programming. I, for one, welcome the vibe coders. I hope it grows their interest in the field and encourages them to go deeper and learn more. Will some be lazy and not even try? Of course! Will some get curious and learn the ins and outs? Absolutely.

factsaresacred 1y ago

Crazy that devs choose supabase and vercel when Google Cloud is right there. Google were late to the game but they've built perhaps one of the easiest cloud platforms to work with.

bze12 1y ago
Do you use firebase?

daemonk 1y ago

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GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
i dont want to listen to uninformed "AI-generated" music any more than i want to support uninformed "AI-generated" code
- daemonk 1y ago
  Sure. But it's not really about you. I wouldn't break into someone's house and tell them they painted their house an uninformed color. If something sucks or won't scale, it will sort itself out in the market.
  - GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
    > I wouldn't break into someone's house and tell them they painted their house an uninformed color. but if you, an experienced professional painter, were hired to repaint somebody's house, and that person used bad paint (or something else entirely, like... i dunno, shellac, or white glue), your scope of work changes from "light prep and paint" to a much more involved job of undoing the previous work (or mistakes) and then getting to the original scope of work. > If something sucks or won't scale, it will sort itself out in the market. i truly don't mean this in a derogatory way but that sounds incredibly naive.
    - daemonk 1y ago
      I don’t think we are going to agree on this. At the end of the day we are really just disagreeing on how seriously we should take AI-ification of software engineering. I take a lighter stance that it’s mostly harmless and has a lot of educational positives. I guess you foresee a lot of potential harm. I do appreciate people who are willing to be the canary in the coal mine. I just find that a lot of the criticism appears to be more gatekeeping than legitimate worries.

hfgjbcgjbvg 1y ago

The new age is back

frankfrank13 1y ago

A lot of comments seem to take issue with Supabase being aligned to Vibe-coding, which is understandable, but I do think it's related! I think vibe-coding could very well be a real market-force, and as best as I can tell it exists within a specific type of tech circle. No one is vibe coding Elixir, no one is vibe coding Rust, people are vibe coding React + Node/Python, and more specifically I think people are watching streamers and YT videos on hot-new-frameworks-near-you and want to try them out! Supabase is absolutely a darling of this tech-circle, and I think a few other companies could be as well: 1. oxc (oxlint) 2. vercel 3. fly.io probably more! and more every day

doctorpangloss 1y ago
New frameworks don't align with vibe coding at all, because they are poorly represented in OpenAI, Anthropic & Google's datasets.
- jedberg 1y ago
  But you can just give them a prompt to teach them. Case in point, Transact has a prompt that you can put into an LLM that enables it to one-shot some simple programs: https://github.com/dbos-inc/dbos-docs/blob/main/docs/python/prompting.md https://github.com/dbos-inc/dbos-docs/blob/main/docs/python/...
curiouser3 1y ago
>no one is vibe coding elixir I did :) I made a browser-based MMO with Phoenix to test out liveview and learn the language: https://shopkeep.gg https://shopkeep.gg And it was pretty annoying. Elixir doesn't really lend itself to vibe coding due to namespacing and aliasing of modules, pattern matching, all without static typing (I know, Dialyzer...). It also struggles to understand the difference between LiveComponents and LiveViews, where to send/handle messages between layers. Without references to filenames, the agent perpetually decides "this doesn't exist, so I'll write it :)". I found it to be pretty challenging before figuring out I could force the agent to run `mix xref callers <Some.Module>` when trying to do cross-module refs. (caveat: this was all with claude 3.5 sonnet)
1y ago

siliconc0w 1y ago

I've been testing out PostgREST, RLS, and PL/pgSQL functions for a new app and I'm not wild about it. It's pretty complicated to grok the permission model, it's awkward to load up your DB with logic, and the LLMs kinda suck at reliably generating working queries, policies, functions, etc. So I'm not really convinced it's ideal for 'vibe coders'.

zkmon 1y ago

I'm sure the team might not be expecting this level of valuation. These trends won't last long. Make hay while the hype shines. Who knows how soon people would forget that there was something called vibe-coding and a back-end development.

jbs789 1y ago

As an observation, the quotations and the article itself doesn’t appear very thoughtful or well reasoned. It sounds more like a VC wanted a big deal (or at least to represent it as such) and made a bet, invited his buddies(?) along, and the company has seen a recent bump from “vibe coding”. Some allusion to Larry Ellison. Very light on information to form an opinion…

crowcroft 1y ago

I'm convinced the only profitable market for these DB companies is enterprise. Either that or they need to add features and products alongside the DB to essentially replace the likes of Vercel. Having said that Supabase is probably the best 'cloud DB' I've played around with so hope they succeed.

joshdavham 1y ago

> The startup supports Postgres, the most popular developer database system that’s an alternative to Google’s Firebase I've always taken issue with branding Supabase as an alternative to Firebase. Firebase is a PaaS whereas Supabase is more of a BaaS.

chaosprint 1y ago
can you explain more?
- joshdavham 1y ago
  While Supabase does support many equivalent Firebase features like a database, auth, functions, storage, etc, Supabase doesn't support website hosting whereas Firebase does. Supabase is mainly for backend stuff (BaaS) whereas Firebase is for both frontend and backend (PaaS). To get the equivalent functionality of Firebase, you'd need to add something like Netlify or Vercel to pair it with your Supabase backend.
DidYaWipe 1y ago
Whatever those are.

unhappy_meaning 1y ago

And the decline of a good product begins because it will be all about profits for board members going forward...

constantlm 1y ago
To be fair this is a series D

saxelsen 1y ago

$2B valuation at $16M revenue sounds nuts.. My prediction: They're banking on a big exit to OpenAI or Claude as the defacto backend for an AI IDE. They're the only big alternative to Firebase, and Firebase just got pulled into Google AI Studio.

dangoodmanUT 1y ago
where did you get 16M revenue?
- saxelsen 1y ago
  Someone else mentioned it in the comments. A quick google gives some websites that estimates their revenue to that within +/- 5M

sailfast 1y ago

The thing I believe least in this article is that the investor is betting their career on this investment. Maybe they think that, but they’re still multi-millionaires making bets with other people’s money. They’ll be fine.

jbs789 1y ago
Hehe he’s signalling his high conviction to get those in after him and keep the valuation rising!

radicaldreamer 1y ago

Retool uses Supabase for its out of the box database setup

truetraveller 1y ago
Proof? Highly doubt this.

hfgjbcgjbvg 1y ago

Good for them. They get so much hate online I think because it’s such a “why didn’t I think of that” idea. People are jealous of their success I feel.

socketcluster 1y ago

I built a 'serverless' platform that's similar, smaller but more focus on low-code than Supabase https://saasufy.com/ https://saasufy.com/ All the components are declarative HTML and update in realtime. Similar concept as HTMX but doesn't require any backend code. You can still implement complex UX, authentication, access control and filtered views (indexing and all). I built this app with it over a few months as a weekend project: https://www.insnare.net/app/#/onboarding/country/All https://www.insnare.net/app/#/onboarding/country/All

beeman 1y ago
A 'serverless' platform that's "similiar". But not open source, and uses a token to 'own a piece of it'? Care to explain what the idea behind this is and where you see the similarities?

gitroom 1y ago

Nice, I gotta admit, I like seeing new stuff get funded like this - but man, whenever I read about crazy big rounds, I start wondering how these companies ever make real money vs just chasing hype till the next exit. Always makes me think about what actually lasts long term besides just burn and churn.

xyz_suspended 1y ago

[dead]

revskill 1y ago

Supabase lacks doc, gitops.

6stringmerc 1y ago

Named after a Nicki Minaj song…what could go wrong? Just no concern whatsoever for creators or their brands. SupaCringe but not like I can do anything about it.