51–60 of 133 posts
InstantDB is a joy to work with. Granted, I've only ever built small toy projects with it, but it's my go-to. Just so much simpler than anything else I've tried in this space.
The core product is so good that the AI emphasis feels weird. Hopefully that's just marketing and not a pivot. Unfortunate if that's what it takes to get funding these days.
This is basically a fancy Pocketbase / Supabase?
Stopa also gave an answer here! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47711866
What's the difference between Instant and Convex?
For me (and please correct me if I'm wrong, Instant team) the largest difference and a major source of frustration in trying Instant is that you don't have a backend. You get a real-time database with RLS and a sync engine. You don't get to run business logic. You don't get to write queries by name and gain the ability to migrate the schema as long as the query shapes match.
An honest question - why would we need any frameworks at all for vibe coded apps? I can just tell the coding agent to use pure HTML5/Vanilla JS/CSS on the frontend and pure whatever on the backend and it would do it. No need for hundreds/thousands dependencies. For deployment I can ask the coding agent to do the same.
A few reasons: 1. Unlimited projects: when you spin up traditional backends, you usually use VMs. It's expensive to start many of them. With Instant, you create unlimited projects 2. User experience: traditional CRUD apps work, but they don't feel delightful. I you want to support features like multiplayer, offline mode, or optimistic updates, you'll have to write a lot more custom infra. Instant gives you these out…
How does it compare to photon networking? I've been using photon and webrtc mostly. I haven't had any issues, but I'm always interested in finding better solutions!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would say: We both offer a real-time queries out of the box. I am not 100% sure, I but think Convex also set up a multi-tenant database; so they can offer a good number of free projects well. The way I would differentiate Instant: With Convex you write your queries as Javascript functions. This means you have to do joins for example imperatively. With Instant, you can write queries declaratively. As of today Convex…
Congratulations on your launch! 4 years of work is certainly remarkable perseverance. The sync engine feature looks very interesting to me. There have been quite a few products available on the market today, but none has achieved a dominant share yet. So if this is your main strength, I'd like to see more demos built local first. Curious if you considered shipping the engine itself as a standalone infra piece.
> Curious if you considered shipping the engine itself as a standalone infra piece.
We are thinking about supporting something like "Bring Your Own Postgres", which would allow folks to opt into just the sync engine piece.
Right now we focused on the integrated system, because we really wanted to optimize for a delightful developer experience on greenfield projects.
Congrats on the launch! InstantDB is a joy to work with. Granted, I've only ever built small toy projects with it, but it's my go-to. Just so much simpler than anything else I've tried in this space. The core product is so good that the AI emphasis feels weird. Hopefully that's just marketing and not a pivot. Unfortunate if that's what it takes to get funding these days.
> AI emphasis
It's not quite marketing or a pivot. We've just noticed that most of our users are coding with AI, and really optimized for that too.
Congrats on the launch! InstantDB is a joy to work with. Granted, I've only ever built small toy projects with it, but it's my go-to. Just so much simpler than anything else I've tried in this space. The core product is so good that the AI emphasis feels weird. Hopefully that's just marketing and not a pivot. Unfortunate if that's what it takes to get funding these days.
We last updated our website when open sourced back in August 2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41322281
Back then most folks weren't building full-on apps with AI yet.
Since then we've seen a large number of people find us through content on creating apps with AI. We felt our previous messaging didn't speak to that and we thought it was time for a refresh.
We also invested a lot to make the agent experience with Instant a delight!
congrats!
What does "X Team Members per app" mean? Is this the number of users you can have registered or does "Team Member" have special meaning?
You can think of this as the number of devs. So if you're working on an app as a team you all can use the dashboard and CLI tools to manage the app. No limit on number of end users for what you build