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Supabase (YC S20) – An open source Firebase alternative

supabase.io

271–280 of 374 posts

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

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide a more detailed critique of Django’s “Fat Models” recommendation? How would you prefer to manage this logic?

TL;DR Django models are the database, which makes them the wrong choice for presenting a service-layer interface to the persistence. They are inherently unable to hide, encapsulate, and protect implementation details from consumer that don't care or shouldn't be allowed to access. The Django model is a representation of the database state. It's an infrastructure-layer object. It's is _very_ tightly coupled to the dat…

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

#273
post #140

There is a database management company called Superbase, the names are confusingly similar. I read a bit perplexed about Superbase being a YC company. https://www.superbase.com

Superbase IIRC was a GEM based database system that was the era of windows 1.0 comming to birth. Was nice, I mostly did work in Dataease then, and talking late 80's era.

Dig into the history shows more in depth from my GEM flavour experience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superbase_(database)

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

#274
post #149

Disclaimer: I work on Firebase but I'm always speaking for myself on Hacker News. This looks really cool! Honestly I think the Firebase comparison may be throwing some people off here because this is a SQL-based system, which means there's a huge base of existing tools/techniques/knowledge to build from. I like any tool which makes it easier to build an app. It's 2020 and we still start every app like this: * Pick a…

There are solutions like Hasura or Fauna which give you a GraphQL server automatically.

How come Firebase still doesn't have some sort of agnostic querying layer?

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

#275
post #149

Disclaimer: I work on Firebase but I'm always speaking for myself on Hacker News. This looks really cool! Honestly I think the Firebase comparison may be throwing some people off here because this is a SQL-based system, which means there's a huge base of existing tools/techniques/knowledge to build from. I like any tool which makes it easier to build an app. It's 2020 and we still start every app like this: * Pick a…

> Honestly I think the Firebase comparison may be throwing some people off here because this is a SQL-based system You're correct - we're building on top of Postgres so it's not a perfect comparison. And we're a bit early to even make it a fair claim. I'm glad the crowd here has been so receptive. We were planning of launching in September, but it must have been picked up somewhere on the internet (thanks @habosa)

If you are adding Auth the Firebase way, remember to add an UI for JWT claims. Right now Firebase does not explicitly expose the list of claims UI through the dashboard so everytime you change permissions you have to programmatically iterate through everything if you want a holistic overview.

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

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, do you plan to be a full BaaS? With Authentication, email confirmations, push notification etc?

Yes! We'll let the customers drive the priorities. Right now Authentication is our #1 focus

Will you provide a Postgres instance too?

If not what provider would you recommend?

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

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw this passing by a lot of times, but either I misunderstand the pricing or it is indeed 'enterprise' pricing. Because even small sites I launched have easily 10s of 1000s of users and some have had millions => I cannot see this pricing work at all on any of those without me closing the doors (having margins that are just too small or just making losses) vs making a really good living.

I agree with this. I think Auth0 at one point was building tools for indie devs, but are now focused mostly on enterprises. What have you used instead of Auth0?

We have a microservice for this which we use. It's internal and was extracted from systems/practices that grew over years. Basically it works like Auth0 many of the bells and whistles, but it's just a service in our network. And, probably not a surprise, TCO (cost of running/maintaining it) is a rounding error (few $100/month) for millions of users.

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

#278
post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wrote a master thesis where I compared several realtime database products. I promise you amplify is no where "getting there". It is a crippled version of firebase and there is no fix in sight. For example you cannot even do sort-queries with datastore or Amplify is not working with angular because they have broken typings since 9 months with no fix. And the list goes on..

Neither of those issues surprise me, from what I've seen of the project.

I'm not familiar with the project historically, as I've only been using it for about 2 months, but it seems to me like there's been an increase in activity since the start of the year - like the package modularization, new UI components, and new docs (which are still pretty bad to be honest). I totally agree it's sub-par to Firebase, and if you stray anywhere off the beaten path you're completely on your own (i.e. not using React, seemingly (!!)), but I do think it has the potential to become a viable alternative.

My primary issue with the platform is the choice of a NoSQL database, which, in my view, just doesn't match the majority of application requirements - if you want to do any sort of text search, you have to spin up a whole sodding Elasticsearch domain, which are expensive as hell for a new product and take literally 20-30 minutes every time they're updated with an `amplify push` command. I also waited over a week for one to be deleted not too long ago. That's why my plan is to replace the API with a Lambda function running Postgraphile with some JWK logic to use Cognito for authN, while keeping the idM and file storage stuff.

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

#279

I am ecstatic that someone is finally taking on Firebase. As a Firebase user, I find it invaluable. Their free plan and limits are very generous. The fact they offer not only a database, but authentication, hosting and perhaps one of their biggest features besides authentication: Firebase Functions. I have API's in deployment that are solely running using Firebase Functions and using Firestore as the database. The CL…

I've been using Firebase since 2016 in production and after all these years I find the service quite lacking.

Both databases are super limited and put all the burden of work to the client(s) for anything beyond very simple queries.

The functions have some of the worst cold starts I've experienced. Until very recently the dev experience was terrible but Firebase local dev was released a couple of days ago so this should be solved.

As for alternatives, AFAIK there is nothing that replicates the whole platform but there are better options for the individual parts.

- FaunaDB instead of Firestore.

- Vercel for edge static hosting + cloud functions.

- Netlify for everything except the databases

Etc.

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

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rails is probably one of the best ways to not waste time. I knew they had some of this capability but I wasn't sure if they generated the whole controller, fully hooked up to the models, too. The only thing that turns me off about Rails and .NET is that it's a big learning curve _because_ the projects are so feature complete. Since I haven't worked professionally in either of them, I haven't been able to get myself t…

Agreed, this is a real problem. I recently did a test. I have about a year of rails experience but it was so long ago that I forgot most things and had to look them up. I also wrote quite a bit of node/express but it was in the node 0.10 days so I had a lot of catch-up to do. I started a new app and I got a basic Users and Sessions model with endpoints running (I like this test because dealing with passwords and API…

I think your comment about Rails being more accessible since other programmers would probably know it seems to be true of any framework but (anecdotally) I question whether the hypothesis works in real life. Any fairly complex application built using frameworks seems similar at first but then there’s all kinds of custom hacks and non-idiomatic code that needs to be explained anyway. I guess at least most programmers will be familiar with the shape of the code but how import is that?

I suspect that frameworks are ideal for coding boot camps where one doesn’t need to understand the details of what frameworks do as much to be productive. And for boot amp grads perhaps a familiar framework makes the code more accessible? IDK, I’m speculating.

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