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by TobyTheDog123 916 days ago
These two companies have pricing models that I just absolutely hate.

On one end of the spectrum you have Supabase - a very Vercel-esque "developer platform" with tiered offerings that ensure that you're paying more than you're using.

On the other end of the spectrum you have Fly - a very Lambda-esque offering with hyper-specific per-second per-memory per-cpu pricing where you'll probably end up paying too little and getting performance hits.

I really do not understand why people would do either when things like Cloudflare Workers (et al) exist. Why do people still want to worry about scaling?

3 comments

Cloudflare Workers doesn't offer a Postgres option. At most, there's Hyperdrive to connect to Postgres hosted elsewhere, and even then Hyperdrive is essentially a connection pooler, with all the additional restrictions that places on you.

It's also unlikely that Cloudflare will offer a true Postgres option; their whole ethos is that anything you deploy is deployed globally, whereas relational databases enforce having a single server as a definition of truth. But I'd love to be proven wrong here.

You're right - I should have clarified that I'm talking about new projects - as in "Why would someone choose Postgres over one of these distributed SQLite providers for a new project?"

(I'm sure those use-cases exist, but I'm not sure if they exist inside the use-cases Supabase supports)

Just to take an example from my current project - Postgres has ltree for hierarchical data: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/ltree.html , which has no SQLite equivalent.

Postgres is simply a much more feature-ful option. Going with database-per-tenant with e.g. Cloudflare D1 (besides the fact that D1 is still in beta, technically, but that's important when we're talking about databases) is a specific architectural decision that has its own tradeoffs (like making analytics much more difficult).

Trying running any random Docker container you might need on Cloudflare workers and you’ll see why.

Fly has really straightforward monthly pricing that’s not Lambda like at all, but CF workers pricing model is more similar to Lambda between the two.

It's all about Posgresql ecosystem, DX and other addons.