11 ms·

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 bu

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.

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?
    - giantrobot 1y ago
      From looking at "vibe coding" tools their output is about the quality of bad body shop contractors. It's entirely possible for experienced devs to come in and fix it. I think there's going to be the same problems as there are fixing bad body shop code. The companies that pushed their "vibe code" for a few dollars worth of AI tokens will expect people to work for pennies and/or have unreasonable time demands. There's also no ability to interview the original authors to figure out what they were thinking. Meanwhile their customers are getting screwed over with data leaks if not outright hacks (depending on the app). It's not a whole new issue, shitty contractors have existed for decades, but AI is pushing down the value of actual expertise.
      - namaria 1y ago
        I think this is just another correction. The software market is worth several trillion dollars now. Enterprise is pushing against the rise in labor costs. It will backfire as it did every single time and in a few years competent developers will be worth their weight in platinum. For nearly 50 years now, software causes disruption, demand drives labor costs, enterprise responds with some silver bullet, haircuts in expensive suits collect bonuses, their masters pocket capital gains, and the chicken come home to roost with a cycle of disruption and labor cost increases. LLMs are being sold as disruption but it's actually another generation of enterprise tech. Hence the confusion. Vibe coding is just PR. Karpathy knows what he's doing.
        sally_glance 1y ago
        50 years might be overstating it a bit, lookup tables/hash maps were a novelty back then and available compute resources increased by many orders of magnitude... So maybe we actually had some real enablers in the meantime. My gut feeling is the current AI hype is at least as revolutionary as search engines, marketplaces or social networks (not like recommendation engines or block chain). Though not as revolutionary as the loom or electricity
      - nyarlathotep_ 1y ago
        > From looking at "vibe coding" tools their output is about the quality of bad body shop contractors. Genuinely, it's a lot better.
  - sebastiennight 1y ago
    > Non-technical users pushing that prototype into production with its security holes and non-obvious bugs is bad. I beg to differ. Non-technical users pushing anything into production is GREAT! For many, that's the only way they can get their internal tool done. For many others, that's the only way they might get enough buyers and capital to hire a "real" developer to get rid of the security holes and non-obvious bugs. I mean, it's not like every "senior developer" is immune from having obvious-in-retrospect security holes. Wasn't there a huge dating app recently with a glaring issue where you could list and access every photo and conversation ever shared, because nobody on their professional tech team secured the endpoints against enumeration of IDs?
    - somebehemoth 1y ago
      What about users who sign up for these insecure apps and have their data and possibly their identity stolen due to the misplaced trust? That this already happens is no excuse to encourage even less security by encouraging novices to believe they are experts. I agree it is great that more people can build software, but let's not pretend there are zero downsides.
      - _zoltan_ 1y ago
        [flagged]
      - sebastiennight 1y ago
        My feeling is that this is similar to saying, "non-professional AirBnB hosts are a terrible security nightmare, and the fact that people are not much safer in regulated hotels is no excuse to encourage even less security by encouraging novices to play in the hospitality business". I agree with you on the downsides.
        namaria 1y ago
        AirBnB externality is not the safety risk for guests (although I personally ended up in some sketchy situations years ago, I don't use it anymore, mainly because:) the real externality is imposed on the inhabitants of popular tourist destinations. There was a reason the industry was regulated, and circumventing these reasons with an app has been a net negative to society.
  - yieldcrv 1y ago
    I don't think its bad enough Even us entrepreneurially minded technical devs cut corners on our personal projects that we just want to through a Stripe integration or Solana Wallet connect on And large companies with FTC and DOJ involved data breaches just wind up offering credits to users as compensation so for non-technical creators to get into the mix, this just expands how many projects there are that get big enough to need dedicated UX and engineers
  - kangaroozach 1y ago
    This suggests a strong need for AI powered code security review and patching as a compliment to Agentic coding platforms. Ideally, in parallel to your coding, it could scan your GitHub and output specific tasks for the Agentic AI to perform for you.
- asnyder 1y ago
  Back in the day we'd call this phase a design and workflow prototype as to not have to deal with all the technical components until the actual flow and concept is done. Feels we're skipping these steps and "generating" prototypes that may or may not satisfy the need and moving forward with that code into final. One of the huge benefits of things like Invision, Marvel, Avocode, Figma, etc. was to allow the idea and flow to truly get its legs and skip the days where devs would plop right into code and do 100s of iterations and updates in actual code. This was a huge gain in development and opened up roles for PMs and UI/UX, while keeping developer work more focused on the actual implementation. Feels these generate design & code tools are regressing back to direct-Code prototypes without all that workflow and understanding of what should actually be happening BEFORE the code, and instead will return to the distractions of the "How", and its millions of iterations and updates, rather than "What". Some of this was already unfortunately happening due to Figma's loss of focus on workflow and collaboration, but seems these AI generation tools have made many completely lose sight of what was nice about the improved workflow of planning, simply because we CAN now generate the things we think we want, doesn't mean we should, especially before we know what we actually want / need. Maybe I'm just getting old, but that's my .02 :).
  - _zoltan_ 1y ago
    there is no need to this tedious, boring phase which you miss, especially since it still requires a significant of coding effort (eg to stitch a backend to figma). you can vibe code a fully working UI+backend that requires way less effort so why bother with planning and iterating on the UI separately at all? anybody who actually knows what they are doing gets 10x from these tools plus they enable non-coders to bring ideas to the market and do it fast.
    - asnyder 1y ago
      That's always been the justification to skip this phase :). Tools have just changed. One-person to small-team wonders that could code and build directly made the same arguments. My point isn't to stitch things to Figma, that's abhorrent to me as well. My point is to not get bogged down on the implementation details, in this case an actually working DB, those tables, etc, but rather less fidelity actual full flow concepts that can be generated and iterated. Then that can be fed into a magic genie GPT that generates the front-end, back-end, and all that good jazz.
digital_sawzall 1y ago
How much are you paying per month?
whstl 1y ago
I’ve been using Hasura and PostgREST for a few years now with real big production apps, in enterprise and in startups, and honestly the only problem with them is that backend engineers feel threatened. They are great products that cover 95% of what a CRUD API does without hacks. They’re great tools in the hands of engineers too. To me it’s not about vibe coding or AI. It is that it's pointless to reinvent the wheel on every single CRUD backend once again.
- NewJazz 1y ago
  I have used them too, and I would say that at least for Hasura, performance can be poor for the generated queries. You have to be careful. Especially since they gate metrics behind their enterprise offering.
  - whstl 1y ago
    This is the same for any GraphQL backend. And even REST backends can be misused: I've fixed way too many joins-in-the-frontend that were causing N+1 queries in lists.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
- TSiege 1y ago
  Experienced backend dev here who also uses Hasura for work at a successful small business. I think it's great at getting a prototype to production and solves real business problems that a solo dev could do by himself. As engineer #2 it's a mess, and it doesn't seem like a viable long term strategy. I've only worked with Hasura, but I can say it's an insecure nightmare that forces anti-patterns. Your entire schema is exposed. Business logic gets pushed into your front end because where else do you run it unless you make an API wrapper. Likewise you can't easily customize your API without building an API on top of your API. You're doing weird extra network hops if you have other services that need the data but can't safely access it directly. You're pushed into fake open source where you can't always run the software independently. Who knows what will happen when the VC backers demand returns or the company deems the version you're on as not worth it to maintain compared to their radically different but more lucrative next version. I think the people who write this off as "backend engineers feel threatened" aren't taking the time to understand the arguments they're hearing
highwaylights 1y ago
Having worked with it quite a bit I'm still not sure I really understand what it is, which sounds like a bizarre sentence but: It's Postgres, but bundled with some extensions and Postgrest. And a database UI. But hosted and it runs locally also by pulling the separate parts. Running it locally has issues though, so much so that I found it easier to run a docker compose of the separate parts from scratch and at that point just carry that through to a deployment, at which point is there still a reason to use Supabase rather than another hosted Postgres with the extensions? It's a bit of a confusing product story.
- madeofpalk 1y ago
  it's just a firebase competitor, that's based on postgres and you can run sql against it if you want.
  - peab 1y ago
    exactly this
  - InstaPage 1y ago
    [dead]
  - eddieroger 1y ago
    It's also implied, and proven by some, that having access to Postgres means you can up and leave Supabase if you want to later. It won't be snap-your-fingers easy, but it's more direct than other hosted SaaS where you can't access your data or the schemas.
  - swyx 1y ago
    that "just" is carrying a lot of weight there
- BoorishBears 1y ago
  Not really a confusing story: it's a PaaS that wants to beat fears of becoming another Parse (https://www.willowtreeapps.com/craft/parse-shutdown-what-it-means-and-what-you-can-do https://www.willowtreeapps.com/craft/parse-shutdown-what-it-...) Realistically 99% of the users would still be screwed if they ever shut down, regardless of if it's open (see: Parse)... but it gives people a some confidence to hear they're building on a platform that they could (strictly in theory) spin up their own instance of should a similar rug pull ever occur
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.
spullara 1y ago
It is really good for getting started but ultimately our companies transition off of it.
mrcwinn 1y ago
Elite hacker here. Supabase is excellent.
- isaachinman 1y ago
  Not until/unless it has proper offline-first support. Check out InstantDB and Triplit.
sfblah 1y ago
So you're saying it's something like an updated version of Yahoo Small Business?
j45 1y ago
World still needs a replacement for Microsoft Access on the web. It’s been so long that new ideas are solving parts on the access spectrum without seemingly being aware of it. Supabase and others would have a smaller footprint to add an app layer and reporting layer to their tool since it is data as the cornerstone not an afterthought
horns4lyfe 1y ago
I’m with you, supabase is a fantastic product.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
WuxiFingerHold 1y ago
I consider myself as fairly technical and don't think Supabase or Neon are sucking, but that they're getting quite expensive once you need a mid size DB. If I'd only need a small DB I'd hesitate not a second to get one of them.
DidYaWipe 1y ago
I really wanted to like Supabase, and decided to adopt it as the back end for a mobile app I'm building. So... I was invested to some extent. But I had to abandon it after wasting weeks trying to do simple things. The biggest problem is the lack of documentation. Fundamental parts of the system are undocumented, like the User table. There's no doc on how the columns function, so I couldn't determine why a user is marked as "confirmed" (presumably through E-mail or other validation) immediately upon insertion to the table. There's also no full documentation of client-library syntax. For example the Swift library: There are a few examples of queries, but no full documentation on how to do joins (for example). And just try to use your own certificates; something that I've been doing for years during iPhone-app development was impossible with Supabase. And why? Because these simple scenarios appear to be distant outliers for Supabase. It's as if nobody has ever brought them up before; and even if they have, nobody has been able to answer the first questions about them. If you're not building a single-page Web app that just lets people browse a database, Supabase doesn't seem to envision your application. So I went back to a plain Deno back-end, which is what I was building before trying Supabase. In the amount of time I wasted trying to scrounge up documentation and fruitlessly asking questions in forums and Discord, I was able to learn and implement authorization, and then get back to work building a product. Maybe all this money will let the Supabase team hire some people to document their product.
- Jean-Papoulos 1y ago
  >Because these simple scenarios appear to be distant outliers for Supabase You've only talked about 2 things : Lack of documentation (which I somewhat agree with) and using custom certificates. Custom certificates is not a "simple scenario" and I don't blame Supabase for not spending time on this. I fact I would prefer they work on other things (like documentation !).
  - DidYaWipe 1y ago
    It is 100% a simple scenario. I can't speak for Android, but you have to use HTTPS now for calls in an iPhone app if you want to get it approved. That means you need to deploy certificates to your test devices, simulators, and development machine. "Lack of documentation" speaks to several apparently routine use cases being outliers; otherwise, they'd be documented. I already talked about the User table Supabase provides (and populates in unexpected ways), and about the Swift library that you have no reference for formulating joins through... another critical and expected ability.
ctm92 1y ago
When you use their SaaS offering, it's a good product. Self hosted is a different story. Massive stack that reinvents the wheel for every component, lack of documentation, breaking changes between versions all the time (although this has gotten better lately). It feels like it's Open Source mainly for the sake of good PR, not to be actually useful.
kirso 1y ago
Its the same h4x0rs who would build facebook in a weekend but they didn't
canadianfella 1y ago
[dead]

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?
  - giantrobot 1y ago
    From looking at "vibe coding" tools their output is about the quality of bad body shop contractors. It's entirely possible for experienced devs to come in and fix it. I think there's going to be the same problems as there are fixing bad body shop code. The companies that pushed their "vibe code" for a few dollars worth of AI tokens will expect people to work for pennies and/or have unreasonable time demands. There's also no ability to interview the original authors to figure out what they were thinking. Meanwhile their customers are getting screwed over with data leaks if not outright hacks (depending on the app). It's not a whole new issue, shitty contractors have existed for decades, but AI is pushing down the value of actual expertise.
    - namaria 1y ago
      I think this is just another correction. The software market is worth several trillion dollars now. Enterprise is pushing against the rise in labor costs. It will backfire as it did every single time and in a few years competent developers will be worth their weight in platinum. For nearly 50 years now, software causes disruption, demand drives labor costs, enterprise responds with some silver bullet, haircuts in expensive suits collect bonuses, their masters pocket capital gains, and the chicken come home to roost with a cycle of disruption and labor cost increases. LLMs are being sold as disruption but it's actually another generation of enterprise tech. Hence the confusion. Vibe coding is just PR. Karpathy knows what he's doing.
      - sally_glance 1y ago
        50 years might be overstating it a bit, lookup tables/hash maps were a novelty back then and available compute resources increased by many orders of magnitude... So maybe we actually had some real enablers in the meantime. My gut feeling is the current AI hype is at least as revolutionary as search engines, marketplaces or social networks (not like recommendation engines or block chain). Though not as revolutionary as the loom or electricity
    - nyarlathotep_ 1y ago
      > From looking at "vibe coding" tools their output is about the quality of bad body shop contractors. Genuinely, it's a lot better.
- sebastiennight 1y ago
  > Non-technical users pushing that prototype into production with its security holes and non-obvious bugs is bad. I beg to differ. Non-technical users pushing anything into production is GREAT! For many, that's the only way they can get their internal tool done. For many others, that's the only way they might get enough buyers and capital to hire a "real" developer to get rid of the security holes and non-obvious bugs. I mean, it's not like every "senior developer" is immune from having obvious-in-retrospect security holes. Wasn't there a huge dating app recently with a glaring issue where you could list and access every photo and conversation ever shared, because nobody on their professional tech team secured the endpoints against enumeration of IDs?
  - somebehemoth 1y ago
    What about users who sign up for these insecure apps and have their data and possibly their identity stolen due to the misplaced trust? That this already happens is no excuse to encourage even less security by encouraging novices to believe they are experts. I agree it is great that more people can build software, but let's not pretend there are zero downsides.
    - _zoltan_ 1y ago
      [flagged]
    - sebastiennight 1y ago
      My feeling is that this is similar to saying, "non-professional AirBnB hosts are a terrible security nightmare, and the fact that people are not much safer in regulated hotels is no excuse to encourage even less security by encouraging novices to play in the hospitality business". I agree with you on the downsides.
      - namaria 1y ago
        AirBnB externality is not the safety risk for guests (although I personally ended up in some sketchy situations years ago, I don't use it anymore, mainly because:) the real externality is imposed on the inhabitants of popular tourist destinations. There was a reason the industry was regulated, and circumventing these reasons with an app has been a net negative to society.
- yieldcrv 1y ago
  I don't think its bad enough Even us entrepreneurially minded technical devs cut corners on our personal projects that we just want to through a Stripe integration or Solana Wallet connect on And large companies with FTC and DOJ involved data breaches just wind up offering credits to users as compensation so for non-technical creators to get into the mix, this just expands how many projects there are that get big enough to need dedicated UX and engineers
- kangaroozach 1y ago
  This suggests a strong need for AI powered code security review and patching as a compliment to Agentic coding platforms. Ideally, in parallel to your coding, it could scan your GitHub and output specific tasks for the Agentic AI to perform for you.
asnyder 1y ago
Back in the day we'd call this phase a design and workflow prototype as to not have to deal with all the technical components until the actual flow and concept is done. Feels we're skipping these steps and "generating" prototypes that may or may not satisfy the need and moving forward with that code into final. One of the huge benefits of things like Invision, Marvel, Avocode, Figma, etc. was to allow the idea and flow to truly get its legs and skip the days where devs would plop right into code and do 100s of iterations and updates in actual code. This was a huge gain in development and opened up roles for PMs and UI/UX, while keeping developer work more focused on the actual implementation. Feels these generate design & code tools are regressing back to direct-Code prototypes without all that workflow and understanding of what should actually be happening BEFORE the code, and instead will return to the distractions of the "How", and its millions of iterations and updates, rather than "What". Some of this was already unfortunately happening due to Figma's loss of focus on workflow and collaboration, but seems these AI generation tools have made many completely lose sight of what was nice about the improved workflow of planning, simply because we CAN now generate the things we think we want, doesn't mean we should, especially before we know what we actually want / need. Maybe I'm just getting old, but that's my .02 :).
- _zoltan_ 1y ago
  there is no need to this tedious, boring phase which you miss, especially since it still requires a significant of coding effort (eg to stitch a backend to figma). you can vibe code a fully working UI+backend that requires way less effort so why bother with planning and iterating on the UI separately at all? anybody who actually knows what they are doing gets 10x from these tools plus they enable non-coders to bring ideas to the market and do it fast.
  - asnyder 1y ago
    That's always been the justification to skip this phase :). Tools have just changed. One-person to small-team wonders that could code and build directly made the same arguments. My point isn't to stitch things to Figma, that's abhorrent to me as well. My point is to not get bogged down on the implementation details, in this case an actually working DB, those tables, etc, but rather less fidelity actual full flow concepts that can be generated and iterated. Then that can be fed into a magic genie GPT that generates the front-end, back-end, and all that good jazz.

digital_sawzall 1y ago

How much are you paying per month?

whstl 1y ago

I’ve been using Hasura and PostgREST for a few years now with real big production apps, in enterprise and in startups, and honestly the only problem with them is that backend engineers feel threatened. They are great products that cover 95% of what a CRUD API does without hacks. They’re great tools in the hands of engineers too. To me it’s not about vibe coding or AI. It is that it's pointless to reinvent the wheel on every single CRUD backend once again.

NewJazz 1y ago
I have used them too, and I would say that at least for Hasura, performance can be poor for the generated queries. You have to be careful. Especially since they gate metrics behind their enterprise offering.
- whstl 1y ago
  This is the same for any GraphQL backend. And even REST backends can be misused: I've fixed way too many joins-in-the-frontend that were causing N+1 queries in lists.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
TSiege 1y ago
Experienced backend dev here who also uses Hasura for work at a successful small business. I think it's great at getting a prototype to production and solves real business problems that a solo dev could do by himself. As engineer #2 it's a mess, and it doesn't seem like a viable long term strategy. I've only worked with Hasura, but I can say it's an insecure nightmare that forces anti-patterns. Your entire schema is exposed. Business logic gets pushed into your front end because where else do you run it unless you make an API wrapper. Likewise you can't easily customize your API without building an API on top of your API. You're doing weird extra network hops if you have other services that need the data but can't safely access it directly. You're pushed into fake open source where you can't always run the software independently. Who knows what will happen when the VC backers demand returns or the company deems the version you're on as not worth it to maintain compared to their radically different but more lucrative next version. I think the people who write this off as "backend engineers feel threatened" aren't taking the time to understand the arguments they're hearing

highwaylights 1y ago

Having worked with it quite a bit I'm still not sure I really understand what it is, which sounds like a bizarre sentence but: It's Postgres, but bundled with some extensions and Postgrest. And a database UI. But hosted and it runs locally also by pulling the separate parts. Running it locally has issues though, so much so that I found it easier to run a docker compose of the separate parts from scratch and at that point just carry that through to a deployment, at which point is there still a reason to use Supabase rather than another hosted Postgres with the extensions? It's a bit of a confusing product story.

madeofpalk 1y ago
it's just a firebase competitor, that's based on postgres and you can run sql against it if you want.
- peab 1y ago
  exactly this
- InstaPage 1y ago
  [dead]
- eddieroger 1y ago
  It's also implied, and proven by some, that having access to Postgres means you can up and leave Supabase if you want to later. It won't be snap-your-fingers easy, but it's more direct than other hosted SaaS where you can't access your data or the schemas.
- swyx 1y ago
  that "just" is carrying a lot of weight there
BoorishBears 1y ago
Not really a confusing story: it's a PaaS that wants to beat fears of becoming another Parse (https://www.willowtreeapps.com/craft/parse-shutdown-what-it-means-and-what-you-can-do https://www.willowtreeapps.com/craft/parse-shutdown-what-it-...) Realistically 99% of the users would still be screwed if they ever shut down, regardless of if it's open (see: Parse)... but it gives people a some confidence to hear they're building on a platform that they could (strictly in theory) spin up their own instance of should a similar rug pull ever occur

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.

spullara 1y ago

It is really good for getting started but ultimately our companies transition off of it.

mrcwinn 1y ago

Elite hacker here. Supabase is excellent.

isaachinman 1y ago
Not until/unless it has proper offline-first support. Check out InstantDB and Triplit.

sfblah 1y ago

So you're saying it's something like an updated version of Yahoo Small Business?

j45 1y ago

World still needs a replacement for Microsoft Access on the web. It’s been so long that new ideas are solving parts on the access spectrum without seemingly being aware of it. Supabase and others would have a smaller footprint to add an app layer and reporting layer to their tool since it is data as the cornerstone not an afterthought

horns4lyfe 1y ago

I’m with you, supabase is a fantastic product.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

WuxiFingerHold 1y ago

I consider myself as fairly technical and don't think Supabase or Neon are sucking, but that they're getting quite expensive once you need a mid size DB. If I'd only need a small DB I'd hesitate not a second to get one of them.

DidYaWipe 1y ago

I really wanted to like Supabase, and decided to adopt it as the back end for a mobile app I'm building. So... I was invested to some extent. But I had to abandon it after wasting weeks trying to do simple things. The biggest problem is the lack of documentation. Fundamental parts of the system are undocumented, like the User table. There's no doc on how the columns function, so I couldn't determine why a user is marked as "confirmed" (presumably through E-mail or other validation) immediately upon insertion to the table. There's also no full documentation of client-library syntax. For example the Swift library: There are a few examples of queries, but no full documentation on how to do joins (for example). And just try to use your own certificates; something that I've been doing for years during iPhone-app development was impossible with Supabase. And why? Because these simple scenarios appear to be distant outliers for Supabase. It's as if nobody has ever brought them up before; and even if they have, nobody has been able to answer the first questions about them. If you're not building a single-page Web app that just lets people browse a database, Supabase doesn't seem to envision your application. So I went back to a plain Deno back-end, which is what I was building before trying Supabase. In the amount of time I wasted trying to scrounge up documentation and fruitlessly asking questions in forums and Discord, I was able to learn and implement authorization, and then get back to work building a product. Maybe all this money will let the Supabase team hire some people to document their product.

Jean-Papoulos 1y ago
>Because these simple scenarios appear to be distant outliers for Supabase You've only talked about 2 things : Lack of documentation (which I somewhat agree with) and using custom certificates. Custom certificates is not a "simple scenario" and I don't blame Supabase for not spending time on this. I fact I would prefer they work on other things (like documentation !).
- DidYaWipe 1y ago
  It is 100% a simple scenario. I can't speak for Android, but you have to use HTTPS now for calls in an iPhone app if you want to get it approved. That means you need to deploy certificates to your test devices, simulators, and development machine. "Lack of documentation" speaks to several apparently routine use cases being outliers; otherwise, they'd be documented. I already talked about the User table Supabase provides (and populates in unexpected ways), and about the Swift library that you have no reference for formulating joins through... another critical and expected ability.

ctm92 1y ago

When you use their SaaS offering, it's a good product. Self hosted is a different story. Massive stack that reinvents the wheel for every component, lack of documentation, breaking changes between versions all the time (although this has gotten better lately). It feels like it's Open Source mainly for the sake of good PR, not to be actually useful.

kirso 1y ago

Its the same h4x0rs who would build facebook in a weekend but they didn't

canadianfella 1y ago

[dead]