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!
Supabase defo has a much higher mindshare.
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.
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.
They also offer so much more than just postgres. Though I use them only for postgres myself.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
The thing is, the people with far more information than we have, and with actual money on the line, think this is a good use of their money. They're not always right, of course, but the industry as a whole is profitable and is innovative and "disruptive".
So, yes, this can be a good way for finding new solutions. The most efficient? IDK but it's the best we've come up with so far.
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".
"No, Radio on the Internet."
But once you know these things, you could of course be faster.
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:ANd9GcRCVKYR...
(The Silicon Valley Economy cartoon)