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Supabase (YC S20) raises $80M Series B

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

#81

Post by systemvoltage »

MaxLeiter wrote: post #60

I just started using Supabase on a small side project and am very impressed; the ease of setting up realtime was amazing. However, the dashboard is so slow. Every action that has a server request results in a spinner, even if it could be instant, like creating an empty unnamed sql query.

Unrelated but Cloudflare dashboard used to be like that but they did something recently (few weeks ago) and it is blazing fast. Everything is instant joy. Well, except the Access/ZeroTrust app. Not sure why that's a different app that takes 10 seconds to redirect a bazillion times. It has horrible UI compared to the main dash.cloudflare.com and generally has bad documentation. I guess it exposes internal teams at Cloudflare and some broken product management. Hope that gets better.

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

#82

Post by ehathaway »

michelpp wrote: post #78
ehathaway wrote: post #38

I like the approach Supabase takes in being a light abstraction over Postgres and using OSS. Even in light of the following critiques, I feel like its one of the simplest ways for an experienced developer to start a new project, and it's now my go to over spinning up a database, Firebase, ORMs, and other database abstractions. My main critiques are: - As others have said, default security is way too permissive. They…

I work at Supabase on database security so I can speak to some of these. > - As others have said, default security is way too permissive. They should lock everything down by default. At some point, this is going to cause major problems for some company that decides to build off Supabase. We agree and are internally actively discussing this very subject. > - Although they have row-level security, RBAC is completely mi…

Thanks for the reply!

I've never worked at Zope. Must be my doppelganger.

> We don't "have" row level security per se, that is a native feature of Postgres we expose, and the customer is free to use or not. RBAC is a very broad term, and broadly speaking Postgres has roles and privileges that do access control. Did you have something more specific in mind?

I was referring to the ability to assign a user to one or more groups and then set, at the group level, access to a row or column. When I implemented this, I avoided using PG roles b/c I was unsure how this play safely with future changes to the hosted DB.

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

#83

Post by wenbo »

searchableguy wrote: post #17
_query wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's using Postgres pg_notify to subscribe to tables and using a WebSocket server to distribute the changes. The table watcher is written in Haskell and based on the IHP haskell framework. Using Haskell makes it very easy and efficient to deal with lot's of active sessions in parallel. You can find the source code here https://github.com/digitallyinduced/ihp/blob/master/IHP/Data... if you're interested :)

That's a similar approach to supabase. Why reinvent the wheel? (I'm asking out of curiosity here). Why websockets? Do you allow bidirectional communication? If not, wouldn't it be better to use http push for easier scaling?

> That's a similar approach to supabase

I'm a Supabase dev and the maintainer of Supabase Realtime and just wanted to clarify that Realtime works by listening to Postgres' logical replication because we realized early on that it scales better and circumvents the limitations of pg_notify; for example notify has a payload limit of 8000 bytes.

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

#84

Post by alberth »

halotrope wrote: post #77

Congratulations, it is well deserved! I have been using SB for the past couple months and its great! In my experience what they excel at is picking really good components (Postgres, PostgREST, Elixir, Kong, Gotrue, Logflare etc) and packaging them with little overhead into something that is much greater than the sum of its parts. There are issues of course (slow dashboard, some inconsistencies in auth, shaky self-hos…

> shaky self-hosting story

What makes it shaky?

That's interesting to hear because it seem like the goodwill sentiment regarding Supabase is because you can self-host it.

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

#85

Post by ehathaway »

kiwicopple wrote: post #49
ehathaway wrote: post #38

I like the approach Supabase takes in being a light abstraction over Postgres and using OSS. Even in light of the following critiques, I feel like its one of the simplest ways for an experienced developer to start a new project, and it's now my go to over spinning up a database, Firebase, ORMs, and other database abstractions. My main critiques are: - As others have said, default security is way too permissive. They…

Thank you for this write up - it's extremely actionable. Our team is already chatting about it internally to find some quick wins, and we'll do a deep-dive tomorrow on each of the items you've raised. Some easy ones from me: > RBAC is completely missing We are implementing something here, but we need to find the right level of abstraction for all/most use-cases. It's still unclear to us whether we should make this si…

Thanks for the reply!

Also, is there any plan on the horizon to have the cloud offering support Google or Azure? Id love the option to use a different provider than AWS.

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

#86

Post by wenbo »

searchableguy wrote: post #9
bgorman wrote: 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 diff…

Supabase dev and the maintainer of Supabase Realtime here!

> The real time doesn't work until you enable the sync on the supabase dashboard which was not apparent to me.

Thanks for the feedback! I think you're right and we can do a better job of exposing this so it's more apparent for everyone.

> There are bunch of oddities with how policies and realtime work.

Would love to hear more about the oddities! Realtime works with Postgres RLS policies so there should be nothing odd about it. Set up your policies and Realtime works accordingly.

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

#87

Post by halotrope »

alberth wrote: post #84
halotrope wrote: post #77

Congratulations, it is well deserved! I have been using SB for the past couple months and its great! In my experience what they excel at is picking really good components (Postgres, PostgREST, Elixir, Kong, Gotrue, Logflare etc) and packaging them with little overhead into something that is much greater than the sum of its parts. There are issues of course (slow dashboard, some inconsistencies in auth, shaky self-hos…

> shaky self-hosting story What makes it shaky? That's interesting to hear because it seem like the goodwill sentiment regarding Supabase is because you can self-host it.

Last time I checked it there was a docker-compose file for local deployment but you had to translate that to a working production env on your own. Which would include setting up the database, setting up Kong on edge-gateway, figuring out secrets management, filehosting and updates. One could argue that this is normal hoops to jump through when deploying open source ofc. It just felt way more laborious than the communication suggested. One of the main features the "dashboard" was completely unavailable for self-hosted at the time. So you would not get quite the same experience compared to commercial (again this might be expected for OSS but is a little different from what might have been expected initially ). I just checked and it seems now there is e.g. a (unofficial) k8s deployment plan so it so things might have improved. In general it just felt like it was not the highest priority to get the self-hosted plan up to parity compared to the managed version.

I have no reason to believe that was anything other than the product not being quite ready for the aspirations of the team. There where some comments on on HN that called the Open-Source claims a marketing ploy. I strongly disagree with that notion and believe that the SB team is acting in good faith and that they will deploy some of that fresh capital to further strengthen the OSS story.

Time will tell :)

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

#88

Post by searchableguy »

robertlagrant wrote: post #51
searchableguy wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a similar approach to supabase. Why reinvent the wheel? (I'm asking out of curiosity here). Why websockets? Do you allow bidirectional communication? If not, wouldn't it be better to use http push for easier scaling?

> That's a similar approach to supabase. Why reinvent the wheel? Supabase is a copy of Firebase. Same question?

Supabase real time is open source while firebase is not.

You cannot provide firebase as part of your services because you cannot self host it.

I asked why to understand the reason for another open source implementation.

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

#89

Post by searchableguy »

_query wrote: post #39
algo_trader wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thin.dev Realtime Bandwidth - $2 per GB yes please, sign me up !!! /s

Thanks for your feedback :) You have to send quite a few json messages to fill up 1GB. We think overall thin provides a lot of value and saves a lot of developer time (atleast for businesses), so we price it as that.

I think you should use different unit for pricing.

Bandwidth is frequently used in the context of file storage which can get expensive really fast even with a few users.

This doesn't translate well on the data side where most json responses will likely be lower than a few kb.

It's extremely unintuitive which is why I think most Paas providers use request and inflate the number (10 million requests sounds a lot in comparison).

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

#90

Post by dexterdog »

_query wrote: post #31
sk55 wrote: post #11

For people who have some experience in this, what's the best less-code backends? Hasura? Supabase? Prisma? Thin?

Thin Backend ( https://thin.dev/ ) is the newest of all of those. Compared to Hasura it offers a nicer schema designer. Compared to Supabase it offers better end-to-end typesafety and a more higher level API that offers optimistic updates. Prisma is more like an ORM, so it's designed to be used by a handwritten backend.

$2/GB for bandwidth for a pro acct? Is anybody actually paying that?
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