Comment by chatmasta | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chatmasta | Hacker News Reader

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com