Show HN: Modelence – Supabase for MongoDB | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Modelence – Supabase for MongoDB

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38 pointsartahian14 comments

Hi all, Aram and Eduard here - authors of Modelence (https://github.com/modelence/modelence), an all-in-one backend platform for teams that love TypeScript + MongoDB. Think Supabase, but for MongoDB: auth, cron jobs, email, monitoring, without glue code before you can ship.

As Karpathy (and many of us) noted, getting from prototype to production is mostly painful integration work. The pieces exist, but stitching them together reliably is the hard part: https://x.com/karpathy/status/1905051558783418370. YC AI Startup School talk about this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=shared&t=1940&v=LCEmiR...

We intend to fill those gaps! What you get out of the box:

- Authentication / user management

- Database

- Email integration (3rd party, but things like user verification emails work out of the box)

- AI integration

- Cron jobs

- Monitoring / Telemetry

- Configs & secrets

- Analytics (coming soon)

- File uploads (coming soon)

How it runs: A Node.js backend with MongoDB. It's frontend-agnostic, so you can use our minimal Vite + React starter or drop Modelence behind an existing Next.js (or any) frontend.

We're also building a managed cloud, similar to what Vercel is for Next.js, except Modelence focuses on the backend instead of the frontend (Vercel is great for content sites like landing pages, blogs, etc, but things like persistent connections and complex backend logic outgrow it quickly). You can find a quick demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4f22FyPpI8

We're looking for early users (especially TS teams on MongoDB). Tell us what's missing, what's confusing, and what you'd want before trusting this in prod. Happy to answer anything!

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I remember when Supabase launched calling themselves open source Firebase… it must feel good to be on the other side of that a few years later. That said, they invested in Postgres in 2021… which is different from investing in Mongo in 2025…

Congrats on the launch. But MongoDB seems like a risky horse to hitch your wagon… why did you choose it? I haven’t seen new MongoDB deployments in a _long_ time, and the audience who used to make them (bootcamp graduates, basically) has probably moved onto Supabase.

If I need a NoSQL database I’m going with Elastic/OpenSearch. And I’m using it for a specific reason, e.g. as a landing zone for JSON data with unknown shape at coding time (like for a web scraper). I’m not using it as an application backend and I wouldn’t use Mongo for that either. And of course I'll use Elastic as a search index, but I would never use Mongo for that. The Mongo use case has gotten increasingly narrow.

I agree - Postgres has been on the rise for the past years, but I think the reason for MongoDB going down in popularity is not reflective of its own progress - MongoDB has only been technically getting better and they’ve recently bought Voyage AI which is now bringing built-in embeddings with MongoDB Atlas vector search.

The previous startup I’ve co-founded has been running on MongoDB since 2014 and everything was great for over 10 years of using it as our main db, hosting over million users and large enterprise customers.

A lot of this is obviously subjective, but we’ve always found MongoDB’s flexibility work great for a startup’s constant db changes. And we also believe that the existence of “Supabase for MongoDB” will be a good reason for more people to use it.

I think it’s a risky bet, but at least you have a clear exit path of Mongo acquiring you. And you won’t face much competition, so if you execute well and get on their radar (Mongo sales reps continuously hearing customers ask about you), then you stand a good chance of success.

Seeing a comment like this framed with authority but with significant conceptual errors is concerning.

First of all Elastic/OpenSearch is not a database in the traditional sense of the word... it's not built for durability, consistency, or transactional capabilities. To hear it even described as a database is a little bit concerning.

Meanwhile MongoDB has integrated lucene into the product's distributed system to bring search on top of the ACID capabilities it offers out of the box.

Looks cool, good luck with the launch!

A well designed login component to go along with this might do wonders for the adoption.

Thanks! We do have the auth components here - https://github.com/modelence/modelence/tree/main/packages/au...

Probably need to add screenshots also, but our own platform at https://cloud.modelence.com uses these built-in auth UI from Modelence and a lot of other things it is bootstrapped with.

Could Modelence Cloud users have a "Change password" option?

I couldn't find an option to change password, and "Forgot password" appears to require contacting support by email.

Also, having an option for 2FA would be great.

Yup - it’s work in progress! We will be adding both shortly.

The intro says the product is “AI-native”, but I couldn’t find any details about this in the docs. What does it mean?

If you check our landing page, we have a section where we explain that a bit: https://modelence.com

One of the AI-native aspects is if you use the built-in AI SDK (https://github.com/modelence/modelence/tree/main/packages/ai), you get all your AI prompt runs in the built-in dashboard in Modelence Cloud and you can also connect your AI provider (e.g. OpenAI) in the dashboard without having to manually specify the key in the code or pass through environment variables.

But there's more we adding soon - vector search and embeddings that are built into your database / MongoDB documents.

looking at the examples, it looks more like a Rails alternative?

Rails for Ruby is similar with the simplicity and structure (same idea here for TypeScript), but Modelence is more cloud-first focused and less of a pure framework.

Does this have a live layer? Would be a miss if not

Do you mean real-time data / live sync? It is actually the next thing we're going to release, so yes - it is definitely a core part. We took our inspiration from https://meteor.com and it had a big emphasis on live data which we're going to support in a more scalable way.

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