Supabase

Supabase is a hosted Postgres database with the surrounding pieces an app needs: an API generated from your tables, authentication, file storage and small serverless functions. Underneath it is ordinary Postgres, which is the reason I trust it.

How I use it

It is the database behind two of my products and behind a handful of personal tools. A table of leads from a contact form, a log that a scheduled script appends to, a small dashboard that reads a few views. Each lives in its own project with its own keys. Because it is plain Postgres, I design the schema in SQL, write migrations as files in the repo, and the API appears without me writing a line of backend code. A Python script talks to it with the same client library the web app uses.

What surprised me is how far the free plan goes. A product with real users ran on it for months before the compute limit mattered. The dashboard's SQL editor is good enough that I stopped opening a desktop database client. What annoys me are two things. Free projects pause after seven days without traffic, and the first you hear of it is a user telling you the app is down; I now keep a cron pinging the ones that must stay awake. And compute is per project, so the moment you want a second isolated database on the paid plan, the bill roughly doubles. Row-level security is powerful and I have twice written a policy that looked right and was not; test those with a real user token, not the admin key.

Who it is for

Developers building anything that needs a database and an API, from a side project to a product. If you know SQL, you will feel at home in an hour. If you need something lighter than a database, a spreadsheet tool may be enough. Skip it if you want a NoSQL document store or if you need many small isolated databases; the per-project pricing will push you toward one big project with careful schemas, which is fine, but decide that early.