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Comment by k2xl | Hacker News Reader

I've been a lukewarm user of Supabase for my side projects. Unfortunately the amount of work to get off of it has been too high for me to leave.

The major issue is - cost. It is way more expensive than I realized as they have so many little ways they charge you. It's almost like death by thousands of paper cuts. My bill for my app with just a few thousand users was $70 last month.

I do like the tooling and all, but the pricing has been very confusing.

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Kind of the same feeling, I don't use all of services they offer either and when I looked at self-hosting, it all seemed kind of heavy and fragile to self-host. I ended up replicating the parts I used with a small API layer connected to a managed postgres db for a tenth of the cost or something. I'd say it's pretty handy for prototyping but not sure I'd want to build a business on the back of it.

> just a few thousand users was $70 last month.

Few Thousand!?! Sound very reasonable to me. Monetize just two of those users at $35 per month and your server costs are covered. Or run it yourself, there's a lot of moving parts but it's all open source.

> Few Thousand!?! Sound very reasonable to me. Monetize just two of those users at $35 per month and your server costs are covered

That's one way to look at it, but compared to any other way to run a server, it's objectively terrible. You can serve that many users with a $5 box.

So put Supabase on a $5 box or build out your own replacement backend if your time is that cheap.

I think i mentioned this in my original reply- the app was already built and too integrated with supabase, it is hard to leave

It's open source, self host it. Or find some paying customers.

That's quite challenging to do. I've myself spent quite a few hours looking into it and came to the conclusion that they make it their goal to complicate the self-hosting by lack of detailed docs. For example: I recall seeing a comment/warning in their docs similar to "for production, don't use this default setup" and it kinda felt more like "tough luck, figure it out or fork out $ome ca$h". Perfectly fine business model, but not 100% self-hostable on a production level (even for a very basic app)

This is exactly the reason I’ve been avoiding it despite seeing it mentioned all the time. I’m sure I’m missing out on some conveniences but it’s just too cheap to host my own pg DB. I can deal with backups and auth if it means saving a not so insignificant amount of money per month.

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