I can believe there are no plans, right now. But having raised over $100mm, the VCs will want to liquidate their holdings eventually. They have to answer to their LPs after all, and be able to raise their next funds.
The primary options I can think of that are not full acquisition are:
- company buys back stock
- VC sells on secondary market
- IPO
The much more common and more likely option for these VCs to make the multiple or home run on their return is going to be to 10x+ their money by having a first or second tier cloud provider buy you.
I think there's a 10% chance that a deal with Google is done in the future, so their portfolio has Firebase for NoSQL and Firebase for SQL.
Having founded a database company that IPO'd (Couchbase) and seeing the kinds of customer relationships Supabase is making, an IPO seems a reasonable outcome.
we receive a lot of community feedback and ultimately there are only a few "primitives" developers need to solve 90% of their problems
I think we're inching closer to the complete set of primitives which can be used to combine into second-order primitives (eg: queues/search/maps can all be "wrappers" around the primitives we already provide)
Thanks for an awesome product. Please also never get bought or make plans to in the future, or if you really, really, really have to then please not by google.
This is my biggest reservation towards Supabase. Google bought Firebase in 2014. I've seen Vercel run Nextjs in to the ground and fuck up their pricing for some short-term gains. And Figma almost got bought by Adobe. I have a hard time trusting products with heavy VC backing.
I’m not defending Vercel or VC backed companies per se, but I don’t understand your comments towards Vercel. They still offer a generous hobby plan and Next.js is still actively maintained open source software that supports self-hosting.
Heroku might be a better example of a company that was acquired and the shut down their free plan.
Supabase and Next.js are not the same. Supabase can be self-hosted but it’s not easy to do so and a lot of moving parts. Most of my Next.js apps are not even on Vercel. They can easily be deployed to Netlify, Railway, Render, etc.
We know, but it screws over your existing customers when a very helpful tool is turned over to a greedy investment firm that’s gonna gut the product seeking the highest return
I think Vercel and Next.js are built by the same group of people, the same people who made Now.sh, started the company (Zeit), then changed product name to Now.sh, then changed company and product name to Vercel.
Not defending NextJS, I'm pretty out on it myself, but ISG requires a server to run. It pregenerates static content for defined pages and serves that until revalidating. If you've built a fully static bundle, nothing exists that would handle that incremental/revalidating logic.
I understand that ISG requires a server (Node.js runtime) to run it, that's why I want to disable it for my SSG Next.js static site, but I can't figure out how. I just want static hosting like S3+Cloudfront which is much faster.
the only reason i am using supabase is that its cheap and i can export it to postgres, thats it.
i know that one day these founders will exit and it will be sold to AWS, Google or Microsoft cloud.
so its a bit of a gamble but that risk is offset by its super cheap cost and ability to export out the data and swap out the pieces (more work but at that point you should be cashflow positive to pay engineers to do it for you).
Firebase was such a terrible loss. I had been following it quite closely on its mailing list until the Google takeover, then it seemed like progress slowed to a halt. Also having big brother watching a common bootstrap framework's data like that, used by countless MVP apps, doesn't exactly inspire confidence, but that's of course why they bought it.
At the time, the most requested feature was a push notification mechanism, because implementing that on iOS had a steep learning curve and was not cross-platform. Then probably some more advanced rules to be able to do more functional-style permissions, possibly with variables, although they had just rolled out an upgraded rules syntax. And also having a symlink metaphor for nodes might have been nice, so that subtrees could reflect changes to others like a spreadsheet, for auto-normalization without duplicate logic. And they hadn't yet implemented an incremental/diff mechanism to only download what's needed at app startup, so larger databases could be slow to load. I don't remember if writes were durable enough to survive driving through a tunnel and relaunching the app while disconnected from the internet either. I'm going from memory and am surely forgetting something.
Does anyone know if any/all of the issues have been implemented/fixed yet? I'd bet money that the more obvious ones from a first-principles approach have not, because ensh!ttification. Nobody's at the wheel to implement these things, and of course there's no budget for them anyway, because the trillions of dollars go to bowing to advertisers or training AI or whatnot.
IMHO the one true mature web database will be distributed via something like Raft, have rich access rules, be log based with (at least) SQL/HTTP/JSON interfaces to the last-known state and access to the underlying sets selection/filtering/aggregation logic/language, support nested transactions or have all equivalent use-cases provided by atomic operations with examples, be fully indexed by default with no penalty for row or column based queries (to support both table and document-oriented patterns and even software transactional memories - STMs), have column and possibly even row views (not just table views), use a copy-on-write mechanism internally like Clojure's STM for mostly O(1) speed, be evented with smart merge conflicts to avoid excessive callbacks, preferable with a synchronized clock timestamp ordered lexicographically:
Loosely this next-gen web database would be ACID enough for business and realtime enough for gaming, probably through an immediate event callback for dead reckoning, with an optional "final" argument to know when the data has reached consensus and was committed, with visibility based on the rules system. Basically as fast as Redis but durable.
A runner up was the now (possibly) defunct RethinkDB. Also PouchDB/PouchBase, a web interface for CouchDB.
I haven't had time to play with Supabase yet, so any insights into whether it can do these things would be much appreciated!
Never used Supabase before but I'm very much comfortable with their underlying stack. I use a combination of postgres, PostgREST, PLv8 and Auth0 to achieve nearly the same thing.
we only have plans to keep pushing open standards/tools - hopefully we have enough of a track record here that it doesn't feel like lip service