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A recent project on HN declared Supabase dead: https://www.isthistechdead.com/supabase https://www.isthistechdead.com/supabase While the funding is impressive,

by 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.
slig 1y ago
Also HN consensus: Word Press with 40%+ of the web is dead, Firefox with less than 5% of desktop and 0% of mobile is thriving and AI is a fad.
brettnak 1y ago
We're currently using supabase in production. I was already planning to leave them. I feel like it's close to good, but still really does have a _lot_ of bugs. It really doesn't feel like it's been tested thoroughly, and the documentation, while present, leaves a lot to be desired. My experience of supabase really demonstrates to me that the ideals of all of the postgres layer technologies - postrest, realtime via wal, jwt auth in the db -, just don't make for an easy experience. It all works (mostly) but I find it more annoying than useful and have to work around it more often than I'd like. I suppose I'm old school, but just building the things that one needs is often more robust and less work than trying to plug into what they've provided. I really don't know what they're going to do with a series D. It seems they now _have_ to go for a high-value exit, but I really don't see which company would provide that exit.
- murdockq 1y ago
  I had similar experience with everything missing that final attention to detail and polish and having to write issues and ask other how they got past certain problems. I ended up switching to Pocketbase, and while it is not a complete or drop in replacement hosted service, it is light weight and approachable to feel comfortable that it can scale and be more stable long term.
- xixixao 1y ago
  You should try Convex. It’s a better, higher level abstraction than Supabase.
solatic 1y ago
I find it ironic that a project using Supabase declared Supabase dead (if you press F to pay respects, you get an error message that their Supabase is hammered and try again later).

by awb 1y ago

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.

slig 1y ago

Also HN consensus: Word Press with 40%+ of the web is dead, Firefox with less than 5% of desktop and 0% of mobile is thriving and AI is a fad.

brettnak 1y ago

We're currently using supabase in production. I was already planning to leave them. I feel like it's close to good, but still really does have a _lot_ of bugs. It really doesn't feel like it's been tested thoroughly, and the documentation, while present, leaves a lot to be desired. My experience of supabase really demonstrates to me that the ideals of all of the postgres layer technologies - postrest, realtime via wal, jwt auth in the db -, just don't make for an easy experience. It all works (mostly) but I find it more annoying than useful and have to work around it more often than I'd like. I suppose I'm old school, but just building the things that one needs is often more robust and less work than trying to plug into what they've provided. I really don't know what they're going to do with a series D. It seems they now _have_ to go for a high-value exit, but I really don't see which company would provide that exit.

murdockq 1y ago
I had similar experience with everything missing that final attention to detail and polish and having to write issues and ask other how they got past certain problems. I ended up switching to Pocketbase, and while it is not a complete or drop in replacement hosted service, it is light weight and approachable to feel comfortable that it can scale and be more stable long term.
xixixao 1y ago
You should try Convex. It’s a better, higher level abstraction than Supabase.

solatic 1y ago

I find it ironic that a project using Supabase declared Supabase dead (if you press F to pay respects, you get an error message that their Supabase is hammered and try again later).