Supabase is an open source Firebase alternative.
Today, we're moving to Beta
After the launch of our Alpha Program in June,
we've been fortunate to work with thousands of early adopters on improving both our Open Source, and Hosted offerings. Companies like Xendit, Monitoro, and TAYFA are using Supabase to ship more products, faster.
Alpha Program in Numbers
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Hosted Databases
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Github Stars
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Github issues resolved
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Forks of our repositories
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Active Github contributors
0K
Lines of code
Supabase Beta is starting now.
To deliver a production-ready platform, we've put extra effort into three areas of Supabase.
01
Performance
02
Security
03
Reliability
We received an incredible number of feature requests from our Alpha Users, and we're using these conversations build a simple, predictable Beta Pricing model.
04
New Features & Integrations
05
Beta Pricing
Open Source is, and will always be, at the core of everything that we do. Find out how we've been working with the community to support existing OSS projects and Communities.
06
Open Source
And finally, we're partnering with the best in the business to help us achieve our goal of becoming the default backend for every company. We'll be announcing the details soon, and we're excited to share what we have in store for 2021:
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Funding Partners
08
Scaling Our Team
09
What's Next
Performance
We started Supabase to give developers a web-ready database that is delightful to use, without sacrificing speed and scale. Postgres makes this possible, handling massive amounts of data without sacrificing read and write speed.
We tweaked our stack obsessively during our Alpha program to tease out superior performance. We chose the hyper-scalable Elixir to handle our Realtime engine, and have supported the PostgREST team while they improved the performance of their auto-generated CRUD APIs.
We're publishing the results of our benchmarks here and we'll continue to seek gains throughout our Beta program and beyond. Our benchmarks are open source so that the community can better our methodologies and identify areas of improvement for the tools which we support at Supabase.
Read (requests/s)
Supabase
1167/s
Firestore
366/s
3.2x
more reads per second
Write (requests/s)
Supabase
870/s
Firestore
280/s
3.1x
more writes per second
Benchmarks were run from a neutral host (Digital Ocean Droplet 4 GB Memory / 80 GB Disk / SGP1 - Ubuntu 20.04 (LTS) x64) against a table/collection pre-populated with 1 million rows. The Supabase database and API used are each running on AWS EC2 t3a.micro instances.
Supabase is available in 7 different geographic regions. We're adding more regions as we build up multi-cloud support. Soon we'll offer read-replicas to scale your database right to the edge - reducing latency and giving your users a better experience.
One of our key metrics at Supabase is "Time to Value". How fast can a user go from sign up, to making their first API request? How fast can they go from development to production? We've built several case studies on our blog, demonstrating how Supabase enables them to build and scale their product in as little time as possible.
Security
As an infrastructure provider, security has been a priority from day one. While we had to resolve brute force attacks on our customers' databases, we internally run pen tests to ensure that our own systems are air-tight.
Approaching the launch of our Beta period, we worked with security advisors and specialists globally to enforce new measures and processes:
- Employed DigitalXRAID to run a full Pen Test on both our internal and customer infrastructure. We immediately patched one medium priority issue and are currently in the process of resolving the minor and informational issues.
- Published a disclosure policy so that ethical hackers can help us find vulnerabilities in our systems. We've received reports from this initiative already, and we'll continue to formalise our bounty program throughout the Beta.
- We now run an ongoing internal Capture the Flag competition, where team members are challenged to breach various components of our systems.
- Adopted the Snyk dependency monitor as part of our SSDLC on several key component of our system, to help locate potential vulnerabilities in third party Open Source dependencies.
- Worked with several of the open source tools that we use to improve their own security. For example, PostgREST now uses "parametrized" inputs, where they were previously "escaped".
Reliability
During Alpha we experienced 2 availability incidents, neither affecting customer access to their data. These were:
- A third-party CDN API outage. As a result, subdomains were not created for new projects.
- Cloud resource limits. We maxed out our Virtual Machines limits in some popular regions, and we hit the maximum number of subdomains allowed by our DNS provider. These limitations are artificial and our cloud providers quickly lifted them.
Availability is one of our highest priority goals. We're continuing efforts to maximize uptime and ensure user data is backed up in a secure and encrypted location.
We're launching https://status.supabase.com to keep track of uptime across all of our services and critical infrastructure.
For our Alpha & Beta Users we take free, encrypted daily database backups up to 20GB. They are available to download at any time via the dashboard.
New Features & Integrations
If you're new to Supabase, here's a few of the things you get when you choose us as your backend.
Auth
If you're new to Supabase, here's a few of the things you get when you choose us as your backend. We provide JavaScript (and HTTP) APIs for your users to sign in and out of your application. You can define the rows in your database that logged-in users can access (e.g. only his or her shopping cart). We even provide account confirmation, recovery, and invite email templates which you can customize on the dashboard, and we handle the transactional emails for you. We support passwordless links, and we offer several OAuth providers including Google, GitHub, with more on the way.
Realtime
You can subscribe to changes in your database over websockets, receiving your data in realtime. Companies are using Supabase to build chat applications, trigger notifications, and pipe data to analytics dashboards whenever it changes in their database.
CRUD API
You can use your database immediately, without an ORM or an API backend. We support GraphQL-like querying from multiple tables in a single request, and you can even invoke complex functions.
Quickstart Templates
If you're unfamiliar with SQL, we provide a set of Quickstart Templates to get you building quickly. Very soon you'll be able to deploy entire apps (front and back end) with just the click of a button.
Table View
View and edit your data like a spreadsheet from within the Supabase dashboard. Build your schema, create complex relationships, and import and export to csv.
SQL Editor
No need to install third party SQL tools, you can run queries directly from the Supabase Dashboard.
Beta Pricing
For up to date pricing info see: https://supabase.com/pricing
We're working closely with many open source projects, infrastructure providers, and of course our Alpha Users, to provide a predictable and sustainable pricing model.
Our key aims going into this exercise were:
- To continue offering free Supabase instances for Students, Hobbyists, and Early Adopters
- To price based on predictable metrics (no shock bills at the end of the month)
- To grow with our users, providing a pricing model that supports their growth and allow them to create value for their customers
We are committing to the following initiatives:
- All Alpha Users will receive credits equivalent of 2 years of base tier usage. These will automatically be credited to your account if you signed up prior to December 2020.
- All Beta Users (new users from December 2020) will receive 1 year of base tier usage for free.
- University (and participating code school) Students will be eligible for 2 years of base tier usage (Code Schools can contact rory@supabase.io)
- Early stage startups participating in selected incubator programs can claim additional credits which can be applied to products outside of the base tier.
The Supabase Base Tier is now called the Supabase Pro tier as per the pricing page.
Open Source
Great software is multi generational and stretches beyond any single company.
Supabase is a collection of many projects, and we rely on making contributors to help us build and improve. Because of this, we aim to make open source more accessible and attractive to anyone who wants to contribute.
Every dollar that is given to Supabase in sponsorship will be funneled back to the community to support the next generation of Open Source maintainers.
One of the biggest barriers to Open Source is knowing exactly how to get started. We're partnering with Strive School to educate the next generation of programmers in Open Source - providing tutorials, Founder Office Hours, and other free resources.
If you teach programming, and you're interested in offering OSS tuition to your students, we're actively looking for more education partners. Email rory@supabase.io to find out more.
Come and get involved in our GitHub.
Funding Partners
Building a platform that can offer all the amazing features of Firebase will take resources - more than most open source tools. Ours will be a long journey and it will require the help of many experienced engineers.
The partners we choose for this journey must be aligned with our ethos as an open source company. In a few weeks we'll release the full details of our Seed round. Today, we're happy to announce one key partner who needs no introduction: Mozilla.
Open source is at the very core of what Mozilla do - we're humbled and excited to work with them.
Follow us on Twitter and we'll let you know when we announce the details of the round.
Scaling Our Team
We are extremely proud of our team. We're a mix of 11 engineers, from 8 different countries. Half of the team are previous founders - collectively we've founded 15 companies, generating millions in revenue.
We're also passionate about tech and open source. We hire open source maintainers to work full time on the products we use, and we spend every Friday dogfooding Supabase to make it better.
We are hiring across multiple positions including PostgreSQL engineers, Cloud engineers, SRE's, and Developer Advocates. We are a fully remote team, spanning 4 continents and 10 nationalities. If you are interested and think you can be a factor in the success of Supabase, get in touch at work@supabase.io.
What's Next
If you watch our repos you'll see that development never stops, we ship every day (and night!). We're constantly improving Supabase based on user feedback. Alongside performance, security, and reliability improvements, here are some new features we're working on for 2021:
- Storage - Making blob storage easier than ever before
- Functions - write and deploy serverless functions that have access to your Supabase context
- Local Emulator - Making local development more accessible with a quick start CLI for any environment
- High Availability - Database and API replicas spread globally to serve a global user base
- Multicloud - Spread your Supabase instances across multiple datacenter providers to protect against outages
- Self Hosted - 'Bring your own cloud' is essential for some businesses, and so we're working on easy-deploy tooling for customers with this requirement
- More client libraries - members of the community are helping us build client libraries for many different languages including TypeScript, Python, Dart, C#, and Rust. Come and help us bring Supabase to your favorite language or framework.
We depend on your feedback to continually improve Supabase. Email us at support@supabase.io or join the discussion on GitHub to let us know how we can help you build things faster.