[bitwidget]

With Supabase being a very similar product to Firebase, with the addition of a self hosted version (something that is hard to profit off of), what is the plan for the future in getting market share from Firebase users? I can see that GraphQL was added recently and that is a great feature that Firebase doesn't have, but features like that don't move significant people from Firebase to Supabase.

[swyx]

it is honestly only superficially similar. Firebase has a proprietary nosql database, which is costly, lockin-y, and inflexible. Supabase uses postgres, which everyone can host, so the incentive is to compete on developer experience and moving faster on features than firebase can.

when was the last time you saw anything firebase shipped on HN?

[conductr]

Moving them from Firebase is perhaps the wrong action to measure initially.

Instead, look at new projects only (not existing). If a large % of new projects start with Supabase instead of Firebase then they will eventually have a large number of total users (to monetize).

Ideally, for Supabase as a business, this would combine with churn eroding Firebase's project/user count. And that's the story of how Supabase will eventually get acquired by one of the FANGs.

[granshaw]

A faang acquired firebase which will wither and soon a faang will acquire supabase, and so the circle of life goes on

[replygirl]

firebase could have real staying power. there's just so much value in the ecosystem already that i don't see another community replicating in the next five years. the nativescript firebase plugin is a great example of how firebase can save you hundreds of thousands on build

[bitwidget]

Looks like I could have written that better, I meant to ask what Supabase's plan was to be a better alternative to Firebase, since Supabase is new and has exciting features going for it, while Firebase is old, stable, and has Google backing it with tons of content on YouTube, Medium, etc.. And this isn't me trying to be critical of the Supabase, I love what they are doing, just curious on the business aspect.

[kiwicopple]

The parent comment is actually quite accurate (disregarding the FAANG acquisition - that's definitely not our plan)

We chatted to a lot of developers when we started building Supabase - all of them loved Postgres, but when we asked what they were using a large portion of them chose Firebase, because it was so much easier to get started with. They even knew that they would need to migrate away from it at some point.

So that became our goal: make Postgres as easy to use as Firebase. We're starting to shed the "firebase" positioning now. In the mid-term, you can think of us as an "open source RDS alternative", and eventually we'll be more like an "open source Aurora alternative" (with some extra bells-and-whistles)