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Supabase (YC S20) raises $80M Series B

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Re: Supabase (YC S20) raises $80M Series B

#6
Unfortunately this is the wrong team. I have worked on several Postgres full stack applications over the past few years, and I really wanted Supabase to work, the idea sounded great. The JavaScript SDK, the documentation for getting started, and the user interface are all horrible/half-baked. Instead of speeding up my development, Supabase lead me to waste hours in confusion. It is easier to roll your own auth and setup your own database than use Supabase unfortunately.

For a product whose whole purpose is to enable developers to move faster, the product misses the mark completely. If I were CEO I would shift all resources to fixing the UI and SDK.

I would guess out of all the people who have signed up, less than 1% have actually made a “working” frontend.

Re: Supabase (YC S20) raises $80M Series B

#7
post #2

one of these will finally stick, and more people will be able to build apps

I’ve been self hosting it for the past couple of months. It is a really nice product. Allows one to get fully fledged app with backend running extremely quickly, just drop a front end in. There’s still some annoyances with it though - Work still needs to be done to enable backend communication over services using SSL - it’s currently unencrypted by default. I was able to get SSL working with some minor changes to sources and configuration but it really should be encrypted by default.

The defaults don’t seem super sane either, by default an anonymous user can read your entire public database schema via OpenAPI (which is turned on by default as well), including any RPC’s. That alongside the fact that Postgres grants RPC execute to public by default means that if someone isn’t paying attention they can easily expose execute permissions to the outside world on functions in their public schema to unauthenticated users, and tell them exactly what functions are exposed!

The current response from Supabase is to ensure the API gateway you use authenticates users first - which isn’t really a solution IMO, for multiple reasons. I ended up spending some time figuring out how to revoke the appropriate database permissions from the anonymous role in Postgres, but it shouldn’t be like that. Anon role should start with nothing and the end user should very explicitly be turning on what unauthenticated users can access.

Re: Supabase (YC S20) raises $80M Series B

#8
If you're looking for something like superbase but with a more end-to-end typesafety approach + optimistic updates, check out Thin Backend https://thin.dev/ It takes a bit more of a higher level approach to database operations than superbase, which allows us to do things like optimistic updates that are hard to do in other tools.

Re: Supabase (YC S20) raises $80M Series B

#9
post #6

Unfortunately this is the wrong team. I have worked on several Postgres full stack applications over the past few years, and I really wanted Supabase to work, the idea sounded great. The JavaScript SDK, the documentation for getting started, and the user interface are all horrible/half-baked. Instead of speeding up my development, Supabase lead me to waste hours in confusion. It is easier to roll your own auth and se…

While I don't agree with supabase not being useful, I agree that their getStarted documentation could use some work.

I've faced many issues with the twitter auth. For example, you need to enable accessing email via an additional option on twitter developer dashboard for it to work with supabase. It wasn't documented. I've faced bugs which appeared and disappeared between upgrading supabase instance (You can have different instance version if you created a new application in the middle of beta).

The real time doesn't work until you enable the sync on the supabase dashboard which was not apparent to me. There are bunch of oddities with how policies and realtime work.

The CLI has gone through multiple confusing iteration.

I would still recommend supabase to anyone though. Solid despite rough edges.

Re: Supabase (YC S20) raises $80M Series B

#10
post #6

Unfortunately this is the wrong team. I have worked on several Postgres full stack applications over the past few years, and I really wanted Supabase to work, the idea sounded great. The JavaScript SDK, the documentation for getting started, and the user interface are all horrible/half-baked. Instead of speeding up my development, Supabase lead me to waste hours in confusion. It is easier to roll your own auth and se…

"Horrible" and "half-baked" don't describe my experience using Supabase at all. Yes, they have work to do. Yes, the documentation is lacking in certain areas. No, this round doesn't indicate they've magically got it all figured out.
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