That’s a lot of money.
What’s Supabase’s exit strategy? Are they sustainable long term as a standalone business?
You can also see how money is starting to chase “vibe coding” — as long as you say the magic words, even if your product is only tangentially related to it, you can get funding!
>Supabase is currently used by two million developers who manage more than 3.5 million databases. The startup supports Postgres, the most popular developer database system that’s an alternative to Google’s Firebase. Supabase’s goal: To be a one-stop backend for developers and "vibe coders."
How many of those users are paid. You can sign up for free without a credit card.
It's cool, for certain use cases. I ended up trying it for a few months before switching to Django.
If you ONLY need to store data behind some authentication, and handle everything else on the frontend, it's great. Once you need to try some serverside logic it gets weird. I'm open to being wrong, but I found firebase phenomenally more polished and easier to work with particularly when you get to firebase functions compared to edge functions.
Self hosting requires magical tricks, it's clearly not a focus for them right now.
I hope they keep the free tier intact. While it's not perfect, if your in a situation where you can spend absolutely no money you can easily use it learning ( or for portfolio piece).
Congrats team!
I was a speaker in a local Supabase event just few weeks ago, https://shorturl.at/JwWMk. We had a local event in Abuja, Nigeria. There we promoted their Launch Week 14 series, highlighting new features from Supabase. In reality, it became an event to show people how to bootstrap a quick backend for their SME business in a weekend.
Is the new valuation multiplier number of developers on platform instead of revenue? Valuing at $1000/developer is kind of insane. Valuing at $570/database is also nuts. It's a cool product but I hope the founders can find a win in what must be a pretty cramped cap table.
I've been a lukewarm user of Supabase for my side projects. Unfortunately the amount of work to get off of it has been too high for me to leave.
The major issue is - cost. It is way more expensive than I realized as they have so many little ways they charge you. It's almost like death by thousands of paper cuts. My bill for my app with just a few thousand users was $70 last month.
I do like the tooling and all, but the pricing has been very confusing.
$2B valuation at $16M revenue sounds nuts..
My prediction: They're banking on a big exit to OpenAI or Claude as the defacto backend for an AI IDE.
They're the only big alternative to Firebase, and Firebase just got pulled into Google AI Studio.
I've been testing out PostgREST, RLS, and PL/pgSQL functions for a new app and I'm not wild about it. It's pretty complicated to grok the permission model, it's awkward to load up your DB with logic, and the LLMs kinda suck at reliably generating working queries, policies, functions, etc. So I'm not really convinced it's ideal for 'vibe coders'.
Personally think that supabase and vercel are giving AWS a run for their money, and will start to eat into their market share. The developer experience is far superior to AWS, in a way that cannot be argued away by AWS handling "more complexity and scale". Supabase/Vercerl products are superior to large cloud providers, and while they target a narrower aspect of the tech stack, and to smaller customers, they will expand into more enterprise as their users grow.
AWS needs to get their act together and start prioritizing developer experience
Also, supabase is looking like the go to database for ai created apps. Which will be a major tailwind
Good for them. They get so much hate online I think because it’s such a “why didn’t I think of that” idea. People are jealous of their success I feel.
Raising a very late funding stage in the private market to avoid an IPO in the violent public market I presume? I’m guessing this is the new startup norm for a while, along with reducing burn or exiting at a big discount if not just dying
Nevertheless congrats to the Supabase team!
I love Supabase, but this seems to be the sign they will not be available in next 2-3 years. Or get acquired by someone.
I don't think this is a good sign.
I always felt like they’re the database dogman would use.
Why do they bring up vibe coding here. They are just a firebase alternative and Google has way superior ai code gen tools
Nice, I gotta admit, I like seeing new stuff get funded like this - but man, whenever I read about crazy big rounds, I start wondering how these companies ever make real money vs just chasing hype till the next exit. Always makes me think about what actually lasts long term besides just burn and churn.
I'm convinced the only profitable market for these DB companies is enterprise.
Either that or they need to add features and products alongside the DB to essentially replace the likes of Vercel.
Having said that Supabase is probably the best 'cloud DB' I've played around with so hope they succeed.
I built a 'serverless' platform that's similar, smaller but more focus on low-code than Supabase https://saasufy.com/
All the components are declarative HTML and update in realtime. Similar concept as HTMX but doesn't require any backend code. You can still implement complex UX, authentication, access control and filtered views (indexing and all).
I built this app with it over a few months as a weekend project: https://www.insnare.net/app/#/onboarding/country/All
As an observation, the quotations and the article itself doesn’t appear very thoughtful or well reasoned. It sounds more like a VC wanted a big deal (or at least to represent it as such) and made a bet, invited his buddies(?) along, and the company has seen a recent bump from “vibe coding”. Some allusion to Larry Ellison. Very light on information to form an opinion…
I'm from the future again, and I predict that either Replicate or fal.ai will get acquired by one of these so-called 'Vibe-coding' companies. Supabase included.
When I see valuations like this, they are overvalued until they use that money to acquire another company for a total addressable market expansion.
I'm sure the team might not be expecting this level of valuation. These trends won't last long. Make hay while the hype shines. Who knows how soon people would forget that there was something called vibe-coding and a back-end development.
I don't quite understand the high valuation. I use Supabase for the database and file storage (legacy choice). But those seem interchangeable. Are people using many many more features, if so how?
Named after a Nicki Minaj song…what could go wrong? Just no concern whatsoever for creators or their brands. SupaCringe but not like I can do anything about it.
Not to be negative, but that seems super huge for its worth. How can you even recoup that with barely anyone paying? Founders trying to exit is comprehensible, but how can VCs sign this deal?
And the decline of a good product begins because it will be all about profits for board members going forward...
> The startup supports Postgres, the most popular developer database system that’s an alternative to Google’s Firebase
I've always taken issue with branding Supabase as an alternative to Firebase. Firebase is a PaaS whereas Supabase is more of a BaaS.
Congrats to Anthony and the team! What an amazing milestone.
Retool uses Supabase for its out of the box database setup
Crazy that devs choose supabase and vercel when Google Cloud is right there.
Google were late to the game but they've built perhaps one of the easiest cloud platforms to work with.
The only that hasn't changed in this industry is that engineers apparently can't stand new, green beginners getting into the field.
"They ship buggy, insecure messes" "They don't know how to fix what AI gave them" etc etc etc
Right. Like that same thing hasn't been happening literally during the entire existence of programming. I, for one, welcome the vibe coders. I hope it grows their interest in the field and encourages them to go deeper and learn more. Will some be lazy and not even try? Of course! Will some get curious and learn the ins and outs? Absolutely.
The thing I believe least in this article is that the investor is betting their career on this investment. Maybe they think that, but they’re still multi-millionaires making bets with other people’s money. They’ll be fine.
Supabase lacks doc, gitops.
please fix the drizzle- --> supabase integration.
Congratulations to anyone who can raise $200m, let alone have the VCs fly around the world to make it happen.
Another heroku in the making. Also - where do these millions go? All into engineering?
The new age is back
A recent project on HN declared Supabase dead: https://www.isthistechdead.com/supabase
While the funding is impressive, I haven’t come across too many people touting Supabase or using it in production.
Imagine being a Postgres developer and getting 1% of that while being the core technology powering all these startups
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A lot of comments seem to take issue with Supabase being aligned to Vibe-coding, which is understandable, but I do think it's related! I think vibe-coding could very well be a real market-force, and as best as I can tell it exists within a specific type of tech circle. No one is vibe coding Elixir, no one is vibe coding Rust, people are vibe coding React + Node/Python, and more specifically I think people are watching streamers and YT videos on hot-new-frameworks-near-you and want to try them out! Supabase is absolutely a darling of this tech-circle, and I think a few other companies could be as well:
1. oxc (oxlint)
2. vercel
3. fly.io
probably more! and more every day
This seems like another one of those VC companies which gets pushed by the VCs to the other companies in their portfolios as a probable integration point.
The whole growth of vibe coding really did help them because I don't think actual developers use it because putting things like functions in the database and authorization in the database is something that we learnt a few decades ago is a bad idea.
So I would guess they are used by massive amounts of developers who are new to coding or do not fully know how to code, but are becoming developers and who love the free databases Supabase provides.
Would love to know what is their actual revenu.
Oof this bit is rough!
> The startup supports Postgres, the most popular developer database system that’s an alternative to Google’s Firebase. Supabase’s goal: To be a one-stop backend for developers and "vibe coders."
I'm sure that a lot of the l33t h4x0rs here think that Supabase sucks and is only for amateurs but I'll say that as a former engineer who's getting back into building fun side projects again, Supabase has been incredible and just what I wanted. It's my favorite new product that I've started using in the last year. I hope they build out an enormous TAM of people who don't want to live inside a terminal and make a ton of money.