[supabase cofounder] While we position ourselves as a Firebase alternative, it might be simpler for experienced techies to think of us as an easy way to use Postgres.
We give you a full PG database for every project, and auto-generated APIs using PostgREST [0]. We configure everything in your project so that it's easy to use Postgres Row Level Security.
As OP mentions, we also provide a few additional services that you typically need when building a product - connection pooling (pgbouncer), object storage, authentication + user management, dashboards, reports, etc. You don't need to use all of these - you can just use us as a "DBaaS" too.
Thanks so much and really appreciate you taking the time to respond here.
I think it's fantastic to make deploying existing software/tools easier, and people are definitely willing to pay for the ease, curious though - what prevents the Postgres team from taking supabase contributions (since it's Apache 2.0) and including it in core Postgres?
> what prevents the Postgres team from taking supabase contributions
Absolutely nothing - we are open source and we would encourage it. However we're not modifying Postgres itself at this stage, we're just providing tooling around it. We have hired developers to work specifically on Postgres but we will always attempt to upstream (if the PG community wants it) rather than maintain a fork
as a product designer, I've been with Supabase since its inception. You guys make projects so easy to start prototyping, without me having to think about starting a Postgres droplet or whatever. Thank you so much for making Supabase better every day!!
I prefer to use companies where you're using their bread and butter service. That way you know they won't suddenly lose interest in it, which google has a reputation for, especially anything to do with google cloud.
I just find what Supabase it trying to do matches up exactly with what I wanted - it solves 90% of my developer headaches and all works together nicely.
Plus I just get good vibes from Supabase in general.
I feel like I live in a cave because I haven't quite understood what problem Supabase/Firebase is solving for.