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%
Recommended in 12 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- 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” - Comment from 20 Dec 2025 in “Go ahead, self-host Postgres”
- Comment from 25 Jun 2026 in “Cloudflare launched self-managed OAuth for all”
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” - Comment from 22 Dec 2025 in “Your Supabase is public if you turn off RLS”
- Comment from 2 Feb 2026 in “Hacking Moltbook: The AI Social Network Any Human Can Control”
- Comment from 5 Feb 2026 in “It's 2026, Just Use Postgres”
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.
See all 3 backend platforms, rankedWhat 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”
“It doesn't provide the actual frontend hosting though, which is a bit of a pain because now you have two problems.”
“surely you can imagine a product that is EXACTLY CC but also has hosting, infra, etc built in. e.g. CC + Supabase.”
“If you're building a paid service you're probably already using cognito or supabase or something.”
“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.”
“in almost all cases you are better off using a central database with something like Supabase”
“where the CLI would be non-obvious and the affordances from the tools/descriptions helps Claude maneuver”
“Will probably become a hassle when going planet-scale (tm), but I think for most use cases this should be fine.”
“You can describe your data needs and it'll use AI to generate the table and RLS policies.”
“we currently don't even need paid tiers of supabase since our software is so small”
“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.”
“Supabase yells really loudly if you have RLS turned off with their own AI agent”
“self-hosted Supabase on a $5 Fly.io or Railway instance might actually be cheaper long-term”
“If your API can run on the edge, you can get a database, function calling and user auth on Supabase's free tier.”
“I'm excited to see that Stripe users can finally use Supabase services in a seamless way.”
“Supabase RLS + service_role key es muy potente para separar acceso público vs admin”
“Recommended Nextjs + Supabase + Clerk + Vercel + Stripe which is pretty much exactly what I landed on”
“minimal ops overhead and you can focus on the actual product instead of infrastructure”
“they stripped all multi-tenant features and even the selfhosted version is missing essential features”
“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.”
“I think supabase is safe because it's managed, has plenty of features, and the agents know it.”
“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”
“even supabase which makes this whole process trivial to get going requires an understanding of not-always-understood security premises”
“allows developer to config IAM roles and which role has read-only or read-write access to which tables”
“Is this standard practice with using Supabase to simply expose the production database endpoint to the world with only RLS to protect you?”
“It's kinda shocking that the same Supabase RLS security hole we saw so many times in past vibe coded apps”
“back-ends that pretend to support self-hosting but make it difficult by perpetuating massive gaps in its documentation”
“If you're happy running a long-lived Postgres service, Neon or Supabase are great choices.”
“They do a lot more nowadays to make it clear to the user what is happening, but it still feels unnatural to me.”
“Supabase makes this less secure by default because Security is Hard and they don't want to scare off new users”
“Supabase should really rethink publicly exposing the default schema without explicit consent from the developer.”
“pretty good at warning you about these things in their project specific security advisories”
“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.”
“using RDS or Supabase saves weeks of time on upgrades, replicas, tuning, and backups”
“For small companies things like vercel, supabase, firebase, ... wipe the floor with Amazon RDS.”
“a supabase backed, hallucinated data model with random shit, using deprecated methods”
“100% free, because you can use the free tier plan on both Supabase and Val Town”
“I'm losing like $2k/year in raw cloud costs (Vercel, Supabase, Zyte, OpenRouter, AWS, etc.)”
“Supabase actually needs a paid IPv4 add-on if you want to connect to it in the traditional way”
“It didn't used to be as smooth and it's certainly hungrier with many more moving parts.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.