Comment by kiwicopple | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kiwicopple | Hacker News Reader

hey hn, supabase ceo here

we just announced GA, after ~4 years of beta. for those who don't know: supabase is a postgres hosting company. we also host other open source "backend" tools that make it easy to get started with postgres (tools like PostgREST for auto-generate APIs [0])

we owe a lot to the HN community. you launched us 4 years ago [1], when we were just a few developers. since then HN has been a staple in our journey, one of the best sources of product feedback [2]

the GA badge is mostly to signify organizational readiness. we're at a stage where we can take any profile of customer. we have a support team that works 24/7, and a success team that will help customers improve their postgres usage. we released our Index Advisor [3] yesterday, and we'll be releasing a few more products this week that helps customer with performance and security.

on a personal note: i read HN most days, and love going through the ShowHN's to see what devs are building. thanks for being an awesome community and my favorite place to lurk on the internet. i'll stick around to answer any questions

[0] PostgREST: https://postgrest.org

[1] Launch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23319901

[2] HN journey: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[3] Index Advisor: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40028111

When did the positioning of Supabase changed from a "Firebase alternative" to a "Postgres hosting"?

we're constantly evolving it.

at the start, the "firebase alternative" positioning made it unclear to developers who thought we offered a NoSQL database. We always wanted to be "Postgres plus useful tools" so we started evolving the positioning over the past year

you'll still see "firebase alternative" on our site: I think the comparison is apt and the aspiration remains the same

Congrats to the Supabase team! You've all done some impressive work to be proud of.

thanks for the kind words

My feedback on Supabase: I would like to see a separate PGS offering instead of it being bundled with your other services. I already pay Vercel for hosting and functions, so the problem is already solved there. I can't move my hosting and functions because of the first-class support for Next.js by Vercel (vendor lock-in is strong here). I use Firebase for authentication, which is free for unlimited MAU. The only thing I'm looking for is PGS. I know the current cost is not much even if your other services are bundled together, but that may not be the case in the future. A separate PGS offering makes more sense for users like me.

Why do you not use capital letters in the typical way?

It is a little bit painful to read. Capital letters exist for a reason (to make reading easier)

what exactly do capital letters make easier to read? i dont think readability is why they are used for proper nouns, names, nor the pronoun I. and obviously ALL CAPS isnt a readbility improvement either. presumably just as delineation of one sentence to the next? (forgive my ironic non-use of caps to start sentences haha).

Correct. The dileneation of one sentence to the next, which is somewhat an indicator of the end of one thought - or fragment of thought - and the beginning of the next.

Look how nicely davetron5000's comment below can be read. Proper capitalization makes text much more readable.

capital letters are atypical in many internet circles, particularly younger. so maybe it's a habit from frequenting those circles or a deliberate branding choice

Well I'm not that young. I guess it just helps me to write fast when I'm not thinking about punctuation/grammar. I'll make more effort to capitalize.

I’ve just started dabbling so take this with a grain of salt.

Overall, it’s great. I recommend it to people. The high signal part is what I would work on:

- deeper integrations with common OpenID Connect providers, with a pretty foolproof “bail to browser view that looks like Kinde or Clerk”. there’s only so much you can do, but it’s not trivial to get wired up to a bunch of pick-and choose SSOs.

- prisma should be front and center, the auth/public schema split is not a breeze, Prisma slays at being an ORM, Supabase slays at other things. It’s not obvious whether or not to use realtime or Pulse.

- force the env footprint on e.g. next or expo or whatever, it’s a little glue, it’s a lot of people who don’t pop out of the funnel.

- chat / dm is a common enough use case to be in the wizard (like avatars), Postgres handles it fine for small to medium apps, and arguably for big ones

- have a pass through mode for the local deploy that’s easy to toggle, you guys are fast AF, it’s often sane to dev directly against the instance.

- I’m sure you’re already building the kind of anonymized training sets that let you spot bad configs a mile away.

Again, nitpicks on a great product. I love Supabase.

this is all great, actionable feedback. Thanks for this - really nice list

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