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Supabase (YC S20) – An open source Firebase alternative

supabase.io

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Re: Supabase (YC S20) – An open source Firebase alternative

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might be pedantic of me, but conflating RLS and auth isn't a great look. RLS is a general purpose mechanism for constraining row operations, and auth has to do with usernames and passwords and session tokens.

This is what we are targeting: http://postgrest.org/en/v7.0.0/auth.html We are still doing a heavy assessment of whether this model can be generalised for everyone. It covers the details of both authentication and authorization - we are just building a nice/easy way to enable this for everyone (probably using the same model as Postgraphile: https://www.graphile.org/postgraphile/security/ )

i have seen oracle heavily employing RLS for authorization in e-business suite. and it made things so much easier.

Re: Supabase (YC S20) – An open source Firebase alternative

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why shouldn't they charge for a great product ? When Google charges it's a problem when they don't charge it's a problem.

No, when they tout the product as free or cheap, and then only later up the pricing by 10x, once people have built their business around the older pricing model. That's a problem.

The pseudo-democratic silicon valley model of freemium is the problem. Seducing you into using something with the word 'free' but then trapping you with a changing API and cost structure. They should be up front with the realization that our ability to pay THEM is not commensurate with use by OUR users. Fees should based on OUR revenue, not usage.

Re: Supabase (YC S20) – An open source Firebase alternative

#204
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See my comments on Auth here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23320443 > We want to nail the auth and we're looking at leveraging Postgres' native Row Level Security. This is a tricky task to "generalize" for all businesses but we have some good ideas (we're discussing in our repo if you want to follow - https://github.com/supabase/supabase ) > RESTful APIs I can of course get with PostgREST That's what we use!…

Just chiming in... Auth, free hosting and SSL is what drove me to Firebase in the first place. DB is the last thing. Just thought you should know, when I read "Firebase alternative", I got excited about something else.

Likewise. Firestore client API is nice and convenient, but it is so limiting on queries. One has to know the limitations and plan ahead on how to model the data around them, or risk the ability to do even some fundamental queries [0]. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47251919/firestore-how-t...

Re: Supabase (YC S20) – An open source Firebase alternative

#205

How scalable is this? E.g: What is the maximum active (e.g: writing) user concurrency? What happens when that is exceeded?

Under the hood we are just postgres. At the moment every user is on their own Postgres database with some additional plugins and defaults: https://github.com/supabase/postgres

We are already working on High Availability, and we'll give a very simple point-and-click for replication too (so you can create multiple DB's close to your customers/audiences)

Re: Supabase (YC S20) – An open source Firebase alternative

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firebase smell the Google Maps model with its “free” for a long time plan, before turning up the price when most of the market is used to the product and are to deeply locked to the API.

Why shouldn't they charge for a great product ? When Google charges it's a problem when they don't charge it's a problem.

> when they don't charge it's a problem

only if it means they'll kill the service, or "you're the product"-ize its users

Re: Supabase (YC S20) – An open source Firebase alternative

#207
post #153

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Maybe I am an old fart, but what’s wrong with the steps you mention? What would your ideal sequence of steps be? If the answer is “just call an api to handle your data” sure that works for POCs/Small apps. But I’m a bit hesitant to put all my businesses data inside a proprietary data store that I don’t control and which isn’t collocated with my app (Ie every data store request makes a round trip to the google server…

I've used Firebase for a couple MVPs. It is very fast to develop on. It makes it easy to get a web or mobile app up in a few hours once you know what you're doing. It is definitely possible to be that fast using other technologies, but the learning curve is higher. When you're just experimenting, trying to find market fit and get something to stick, Firebase is a decent solution. I haven't tried anything sizeable on…

I've seen this sentiment echoed a few times.

What are the advantages, or class of advantages, you get by moving on from Firebase to something stronger/harder?

Re: Supabase (YC S20) – An open source Firebase alternative

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

npm install supabase ? :) More client libraries coming soon https://www.npmjs.com/package/@supabase/supabase-js

:) Look I get the sentiment, but you know what I mean. Graphql would be a killer feature.

Honestly we've had a few people asking now - and you've gotta go where your customers are - so you might see it soon :)

Re: Supabase (YC S20) – An open source Firebase alternative

#209
It hardly compares to Firebase - their main selling points is super quick to start, easy to use, very cheap, lots of integrations. Unfortunately, all alternatives to Firebase, even if not counting the large lack of features, are way more expensive, and lack many integrations, especially mobile.

Re: Supabase (YC S20) – An open source Firebase alternative

#210
post #57

I am a strong believer that Firebase model is the way forward. Huge fan of Firebase but it is scary to have no proper alternatives. Yes, sure you can have a similar setup with AWS or bespoke implementation but they are not in the same spirit. Very glad to see people working on alternatives. IMHO though, what makes Firebase special is the glue they use: Account management and libraries come for free so you can start t…

Amazon seem to be working on bringing Amplify up to the same standard as Firebase, and it's certainly getting there, so in the near-future there may be quite a few alternatives.

I find the overall Amplify offering to be a mess. The hosting and authentication works pretty well but the rest of it just feels like they put duct tape in front of a bunch of existing AWS services.

I’ve found Hasura+Cognito+S3 as the closest equivalent to Firebase. It’s not as neatly wrapped up into a single product but it’s pretty close.

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