Supabase gives founders who are building an app a real backend without having to hire someone to set one up. You get a Postgres database, sign-ins and file storage behind a ready-made API. The free plan covers 50,000 monthly users, a 500 MB database and 1 GB of storage.
What it can do for you
Instead of spending a fortnight wiring up a database, logins and file uploads, you can have them working in an afternoon and spend your time on the parts users see. Because it's standard Postgres underneath, you aren't learning a proprietary database, and your data is portable if you ever leave. One Reddit user said they ran attendance, shift and ticketing tools for a small company on the free plan.
What people like
Reviewers consistently praise how fast it is to get started, the clean dashboard, and having the database, auth, storage and realtime features in one place.
The honest downsides
- Free projects pause. They pause after a week without enough database activity, and you're limited to two active projects. Supabase emails a warning first, and you can restore a paused project later.
- No automatic backups on Free. This is the big one. One Reddit user found their database schema gone after restoring a paused free project, and had to rebuild it from their migration files. In another Reddit thread about the free plan, commenters warned people to make their own backups.
- Some parts take learning. Row-level security, migrations and the deeper Postgres features have a learning curve.
- Costs grow with usage once you're on a paid plan.
- Support can be slow. Some reviewers report slow responses even on paid plans.
Skip it if
- you're building something without a database (a landing page or content site doesn't need one)
- you have paying customers and won't pay for a plan with backups and no pausing
- you want a no-code builder rather than a developer tool
Alternatives
We don't list a better free backend: for this job, Supabase is the strongest option we know of. Also worth knowing:
- Firebase is the strongest rival, but not clearly better. It wins for mobile apps needing offline sync, but its NoSQL database suits relational data poorly and its free plan no longer includes file storage.
- Startup credits can cover paid hosting while you grow, if you qualify: AWS Activate and the Google for Startups Cloud Program.
- Pair it with PostHog to see how people use your app.
- Or self-host Supabase if you're comfortable running servers.
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