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Supabase

The most recommended of 3 backend platforms

A managed Postgres backend with built-in auth and functions that saves setup and ops work, with a usable free tier; critics warn RLS security is easy to get wrong.

A managed Postgres backend with built-in auth and functions that saves setup and ops work, with a usable free tier; critics warn RLS security is easy to get wrong.

165 people gave an opinion

recommend it
109
criticize it
56
approval share
66%
Each figure is 2 people. RecommendsCriticizes

Recommended in 12 of 13 months

  1. November 2025: recommended
  2. December 2025: recommended
  3. January 2026: recommended
  4. February 2026: recommended
  5. March 2026: recommended
  6. April 2026: recommended
  7. May 2026: recommended
  8. June 2026: recommended
  9. July 2026: recommended
  10. August 2026: recommended
  11. September 2026: recommended
  12. October 2026: recommended
  13. November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)

Why it doesn’t carry the badge

  • 109 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
  • 1.9 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
  • Recommended in 12 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.

The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works

What people say about it

The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.

Why people recommend it

Each mark is one comment

  • Saves backend and ops work

    “Supabase adds a huge amount of value. The fact that I don't have to code half of things that I otherwise would is great to start something.”

    Comment from 5 May 2026 in “AI didn't delete your database, you did”

    “minimal ops overhead and you can focus on the actual product instead of infrastructure”

    Comment from 20 Feb 2026 in “Almost Every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret after 4 years”

    “using RDS or Supabase saves weeks of time on upgrades, replicas, tuning, and backups”

    Comment from 21 Dec 2025 in “Go ahead, self-host Postgres”
  • Generous free tier

    “If your API can run on the edge, you can get a database, function calling and user auth on Supabase's free tier.”

    Comment from 28 Mar 2026 in “Ask HN: Best place to host a Node.js App in 2026”

    “we currently don't even need paid tiers of supabase since our software is so small”

    Comment from 7 May 2026 in “From Supabase to Clerk to Better Auth”

    “100% free, because you can use the free tier plan on both Supabase and Val Town”

    Comment from 9 Dec 2025 on Hacker News
  • Built-in auth, database and functions

    “I currently use Supabase to avoid having to set up my own user auth on Workers, but I would much prefer to use D1 etc.”

    Comment from 25 Jun 2026 in “Cloudflare launched self-managed OAuth for all”

    “If your API can run on the edge, you can get a database, function calling and user auth on Supabase's free tier.”

    Comment from 28 Mar 2026 in “Ask HN: Best place to host a Node.js App in 2026”

    “If you're building a paid service you're probably already using cognito or supabase or something.”

    Comment from 31 Jul 2026 in “The Session You Cannot take with you”
  • Security warnings and advisories

    “pretty good at warning you about these things in their project specific security advisories”

    Comment from 22 Dec 2025 in “Your Supabase is public if you turn off RLS”

    “Supabase yells really loudly if you have RLS turned off with their own AI agent”

    Comment from 4 May 2026 in “U.S. military data left exposed at an a16z startup for 150 days”

    “They do a lot more nowadays to make it clear to the user what is happening, but it still feels unnatural to me.”

    Comment from 23 Dec 2025 in “Your Supabase is public if you turn off RLS”

What people warn about

Each mark is one comment

  • RLS security easy to misconfigure

    “the very first thing you do is `GRANT ALL ON table TO authenticated` (and often `anon`) because nothing works through the client SDK without it”

    Comment from 13 Feb 2026 on Hacker News

    “Is this standard practice with using Supabase to simply expose the production database endpoint to the world with only RLS to protect you?”

    Comment from 2 Feb 2026 in “Hacking Moltbook: The AI Social Network Any Human Can Control”

    “Supabase should really rethink publicly exposing the default schema without explicit consent from the developer.”

    Comment from 22 Dec 2025 in “Your Supabase is public if you turn off RLS”
  • Self-hosting is hard and incomplete

    “It's not single binary, you need to spin up a dozen or so containers and have a full DevOps team on standby if self hosting.”

    Comment from 18 Feb 2026 in “Pocketbase lost its funding from FLOSS fund”

    “back-ends that pretend to support self-hosting but make it difficult by perpetuating massive gaps in its documentation”

    Comment from 29 Dec 2025 in “Self-hosting is being enshittified”

    “they stripped all multi-tenant features and even the selfhosted version is missing essential features”

    Comment from 18 Feb 2026 in “Pocketbase lost its funding from FLOSS fund”

Other backend platforms people recommend

The two most recommended other backend platforms, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.

Supabase compared with 2 alternatives
ProductRecommendCriticizeApprovalMonthsOwnedBadge
SupabaseThis page1095666%12——
Firebase266329%12——
Convex10191%10—Approved
See all 3 backend platforms, ranked

What people said

40 of the 183 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.

“I fell in love with the vision Supabase had for how they would use Turso going forward”

RecommendsComment from 2 Oct 2026 in “Supabase is acquiring Turso”

“It doesn't provide the actual frontend hosting though, which is a bit of a pain because now you have two problems.”

MixedComment from 29 Sep 2026 in “Firebase SDK is crashing all iOS apps since this morning”

“surely you can imagine a product that is EXACTLY CC but also has hosting, infra, etc built in. e.g. CC + Supabase.”

MixedComment from 13 Aug 2026 in “AI coding startup Lovable raised $400M at $13.3B valuation up from $6.6B in 2025”

“If you're building a paid service you're probably already using cognito or supabase or something.”

RecommendsComment from 31 Jul 2026 in “The Session You Cannot take with you”

“I currently use Supabase to avoid having to set up my own user auth on Workers, but I would much prefer to use D1 etc.”

MixedComment from 25 Jun 2026 in “Cloudflare launched self-managed OAuth for all”

“in almost all cases you are better off using a central database with something like Supabase”

RecommendsComment from 21 Jun 2026 in “Temporary Cloudflare Accounts for AI Agents”

“where the CLI would be non-obvious and the affordances from the tools/descriptions helps Claude maneuver”

RecommendsComment from 30 May 2026 in “MCP Is Dead”

“Will probably become a hassle when going planet-scale (tm), but I think for most use cases this should be fine.”

MixedComment from 26 May 2026 in “Does Anybody Actually Like React?”

“You can describe your data needs and it'll use AI to generate the table and RLS policies.”

RecommendsComment from 18 May 2026 in “Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?”

“we currently don't even need paid tiers of supabase since our software is so small”

MixedComment from 7 May 2026 in “From Supabase to Clerk to Better Auth”

“Supabase adds a huge amount of value. The fact that I don't have to code half of things that I otherwise would is great to start something.”

RecommendsComment from 5 May 2026 in “AI didn't delete your database, you did”

“Supabase yells really loudly if you have RLS turned off with their own AI agent”

RecommendsComment from 4 May 2026 in “U.S. military data left exposed at an a16z startup for 150 days”

“self-hosted Supabase on a $5 Fly.io or Railway instance might actually be cheaper long-term”

RecommendsComment from 21 Apr 2026 in “Ask HN: Hit Supabase's free→$25 pricing cliff. Any middle-tier options?”

“If your API can run on the edge, you can get a database, function calling and user auth on Supabase's free tier.”

RecommendsComment from 28 Mar 2026 in “Ask HN: Best place to host a Node.js App in 2026”

“I'm excited to see that Stripe users can finally use Supabase services in a seamless way.”

RecommendsComment from 26 Mar 2026 in “Stripe Projects: Provision and manage services from the CLI”

“Supabase RLS + service_role key es muy potente para separar acceso público vs admin”

RecommendsComment from 18 Mar 2026 in “Informo.es Normativa europea 2/2023”

“Recommended Nextjs + Supabase + Clerk + Vercel + Stripe which is pretty much exactly what I landed on”

RecommendsComment from 22 Feb 2026 in “Show HN: I built a free AI tool that picks your SaaS tech stack based on budget”

“minimal ops overhead and you can focus on the actual product instead of infrastructure”

RecommendsComment from 20 Feb 2026 in “Almost Every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret after 4 years”

“they stripped all multi-tenant features and even the selfhosted version is missing essential features”

MixedComment from 18 Feb 2026 in “Pocketbase lost its funding from FLOSS fund”

“It's not single binary, you need to spin up a dozen or so containers and have a full DevOps team on standby if self hosting.”

CriticizesComment from 18 Feb 2026 in “Pocketbase lost its funding from FLOSS fund”

“I think supabase is safe because it's managed, has plenty of features, and the agents know it.”

RecommendsComment from 16 Feb 2026 in “AI is going to kill app subscriptions”

“the very first thing you do is `GRANT ALL ON table TO authenticated` (and often `anon`) because nothing works through the client SDK without it”

CriticizesComment from 13 Feb 2026 on Hacker News

“even supabase which makes this whole process trivial to get going requires an understanding of not-always-understood security premises”

MixedComment from 5 Feb 2026 in “It's 2026, Just Use Postgres”

“allows developer to config IAM roles and which role has read-only or read-write access to which tables”

RecommendsComment from 2 Feb 2026 in “Ask HN: How do you give AI agents access without over-permissioning?”

“Is this standard practice with using Supabase to simply expose the production database endpoint to the world with only RLS to protect you?”

CriticizesComment from 2 Feb 2026 in “Hacking Moltbook: The AI Social Network Any Human Can Control”

“It's kinda shocking that the same Supabase RLS security hole we saw so many times in past vibe coded apps”

CriticizesComment from 2 Feb 2026 in “Hacking Moltbook: The AI Social Network Any Human Can Control”

“back-ends that pretend to support self-hosting but make it difficult by perpetuating massive gaps in its documentation”

CriticizesComment from 29 Dec 2025 in “Self-hosting is being enshittified”

“If you're happy running a long-lived Postgres service, Neon or Supabase are great choices.”

RecommendsComment from 25 Dec 2025 in “Show HN: Tonbo – an embedded database for serverless and edge runtimes”

“They do a lot more nowadays to make it clear to the user what is happening, but it still feels unnatural to me.”

MixedComment from 23 Dec 2025 in “Your Supabase is public if you turn off RLS”

“Supabase makes this less secure by default because Security is Hard and they don't want to scare off new users”

CriticizesComment from 22 Dec 2025 in “Your Supabase is public if you turn off RLS”

“Supabase should really rethink publicly exposing the default schema without explicit consent from the developer.”

CriticizesComment from 22 Dec 2025 in “Your Supabase is public if you turn off RLS”

“pretty good at warning you about these things in their project specific security advisories”

RecommendsComment from 22 Dec 2025 in “Your Supabase is public if you turn off RLS”

“Supabase is easy to work with (and thus attracts people who have NO IDEA what they're doing), and less an issue with Supabase security.”

RecommendsComment from 22 Dec 2025 in “Your Supabase is public if you turn off RLS”

“using RDS or Supabase saves weeks of time on upgrades, replicas, tuning, and backups”

RecommendsComment from 21 Dec 2025 in “Go ahead, self-host Postgres”

“For small companies things like vercel, supabase, firebase, ... wipe the floor with Amazon RDS.”

RecommendsComment from 20 Dec 2025 in “Go ahead, self-host Postgres”

“a supabase backed, hallucinated data model with random shit, using deprecated methods”

MixedComment from 11 Dec 2025 in “Vibe coding is mad depressing”

“100% free, because you can use the free tier plan on both Supabase and Val Town”

RecommendsComment from 9 Dec 2025 on Hacker News

“I'm losing like $2k/year in raw cloud costs (Vercel, Supabase, Zyte, OpenRouter, AWS, etc.)”

MixedComment from 1 Dec 2025 in “Scraped 300k Japan real estate listings and created map-based metrics”

“Supabase actually needs a paid IPv4 add-on if you want to connect to it in the traditional way”

MixedComment from 28 Nov 2025 in “Show HN: DB Pro – A Modern Desktop Client for Postgres, MySQL, SQLite and LibSQL”

“It didn't used to be as smooth and it's certainly hungrier with many more moving parts.”

MixedComment from 28 Nov 2025 in “Pocketbase – open-source realtime back end in 1 file”

Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.