What’s Supabase’s exit strategy? Are they sustainable long term as a standalone business?
You can also see how money is starting to chase “vibe coding” — as long as you say the magic words, even if your product is only tangentially related to it, you can get funding!
Reading the tea leaves, Series D means they opted for more funding vs IPO. They claim to have 2 million users, but they're open core so how many are paying? Maybe their books aren't looking that great. Wall street doesn't understand database vendors outside of "big data", so they're probably hoping for acquisition. Not sure who would buy them though, as PostgreSQL vendors are kind of a dime-a-dozen these days...
If lovable, bolt.new, etc kept integrating with them, that's a money maker without needing to do much sales. There's a wave of AI tools that require somehow save state and Supabase provides that. I'm absolutely amazed others haven't jumped in the same ship yet.
That definitely seems to be the play. Keep funneling in users from Lovable/bolt.new and keep building revenue or hope to be acquired if one of those vibe coding tools gets huge.
In the short term yes, but why would you as an end user of lovable and similar tools prefer expensive Supabase? If you already have an AI developer at your disposal you might as well make it figure out how to properly set up and maintain AWS, right? Maybe it can't do it now -- too complicated because there's no simple AI-accessible interface, and LLM models are simply not smart enough yet, but I imagine it will change soon.
Sure but ultimately they're still just selling something that is already free and wrapping AWS. These business models aren't sustainable unless you trash your free product, which also isn't sustainable. Presumably they have a good deal with their cloud vendor, AWS I think, but I think its safe to assume they lose A LOT on their free products.
This is like if Google Spanner were open sourced tomorrow morning: realistically how many people are going to learn how to deploy a thing that was built by Google for Google to serve an ultra-specific persona?
Maybe you might get some Amazon-sized whale peeking at it for bits to improve their own product, but the entire value prop is that it's a managed service: you're probably going to continue paying for it to be managed for you.
IMO it also depends on how the whole process is tied together.
I always loved Vercel for their easy hosting of Next.js with included CI/CD, but I recently switched to self-hosting - their pricing switched from a flat, worry-free $20/month to an unpredictable whatever-it-may-cost plus it sent me 10+ emails every single month about hitting some quotas that they introduced and I couldn't find a good way to stop that.
A lot are paying, including me for multiple projects. They have a pretty good offering. I used to use them for dev and prod, but now using neon for dev. Supabase still for prod. I had switched from mongo to supabase. I may switch to neon for prod but not in a rush.
They also offer so much more than just postgres. Though I use them only for postgres myself.
Since you use both supabase and neon, any particular strength or weakness to keep supabase for prod? I just moved my app to neon today (easy enough to test it!) and am enjoying the auto-scaling features and UI is great on neon. But I'm curious about how supabase stacks up.
Supabase feels less flexible. Also it tries to do many other things so I don't think they can focus fully on the db side. However it still works well enough for production so cannot complain too much. I haven't done benchmarks for performance latency etc though. I should!
A lot of people don't self-host it, even though it is open core. This is due to their docs being garbage and tons of differences between the offerings, so you can't even rely on the main docs if you're self-hosting.
It's easier to just become familiar with a DB UI tool like Beekeeper or DataGrip and spin up your own things. I'm also not a huge fan of being "locked-in" to so many things (including their auth). I think most projects would be better off keeping these parts separated, even if they are using third-party services to handle them, as it would be way less overhead to migrate out.
it's an aggressive preemptive round, so i'd guess 2b/50 = 40M of revenue. Probably low margins since the free tier/ hosting postgres nature of the business.
> What’s Supabase’s exit strategy? Are they sustainable long term as a standalone business?
Acquisition best case, Private Equity worst case.
Do you see Supabase going public on the stock market? Perhaps unless they do what Cloudflare done and are replicating AWS, it may be hard to see a stock market debut.
Supabase is basically AWS Postgres under the hood. It's popular amongst hobbyists and small teams but I'm not sure whether any large teams actively use it. Once you're past the point of serious business, it's much more cost effective to host everything by yourself.
Supabase at is minimum providing a PostgreSQL server, pooler (they started on pgbouncer, how their own) and a PostREST API, and support, backup, logging etc. You can be doing serious business and not have the time/people to run these reliably self-hosted.
They also provide Auth almost to the Auth0 level and Edge functions like Vercel, S3 like storage (sharing the db's permission system), and websocket/presence backed by Elixir. TBH they are a compelling value, at least for us.
Granted, Supabase does provide a lot under the hood, and it's excellent for whipping out a quick MVP, but I wouldn't count it production ready even today, simply because of the downtime I've experienced at times (even if their dashboards say otherwise). And it's not just an isolated case - a lot of folks on reddit complain with the same issues. Perhaps your treatment is different because of the high spend you guys have.
What is serious business? I think supabase can scale brilliantly, and it doesn't lock you in, if you have need for some special infra you can build and integrate it, I don't know but you could possibly even use FDW to access a postgres you run yourself.
Also they can't run on AWS postgres with all their postgres plug-ins AFAIK.
The point of "cheaper to host everything yourself" is a lot higher than what most estimate.
My only concern is that is supabase goes out of business or go evil you're gonna have a bad time, however everything is open-source
Serious business is when you need to maintain uptime and stability. Not just me, but a lot of folks on the Supabase reddit have complained often about the insane downtimes that we've experienced at times with the platform. I would 100% use it for prototypes and MVPs, but for production? Neither me nor a lot of others would touch it with a pole, even though I'm sure your experience might be different.
My former place ran a lot of RDS Postgres but also loved Supabase. It's more than just hosted DB because it has loads of value adds like web-based table editing, auth, edge functions, row-level security, easy hooks and triggers. We were capable of operating RDS but the cost of operations in dev hours was high. Supabase was super easy for moderate price and readily compatible with our RDS and Redshift.
I don't disagree. Supabase does provide a lot of functions under the hood that one would have to build out individually otherwise. I really like their lock-in model - you're not locked in with your data, but because of the extra functionality that they provide to your database.
> Are they sustainable long term as a standalone business?
It's bananas to me that questions like these could be unanswered even 5 years after the business started. This possibly cannot be the most efficient way for finding new solutions and "disrupting" stale industries?
It's very common for tech companies to go public without being profitable. As long as their growth is good and they have a reasonable story for how they will achieve profitability, then it typically makes sense. Of course every company is different and not all will reach their profitability goals post-IPO, but in many cases, it wouldn't make sense to wait for profitability before going public.
Discord has a fairly successful subscription product that is generating tens of millions in revenue. They most certainly have made more than 0 dollars. Profitable? Less likely.
Discord has the user growth to make up for it. It’s practically a household name on the level of Google now. I see many people boosting servers too, so clearly they are making a bunch of money.
> This possibly cannot be the most efficient way for finding new solutions and "disrupting" stale industries?
The thing is, the people with far more information than we have, and with actual money on the line, think this is a good use of their money. They're not always right, of course, but the industry as a whole is profitable and is innovative and "disruptive".
So, yes, this can be a good way for finding new solutions. The most efficient? IDK but it's the best we've come up with so far.
To be fair, their $2B valuation is probably the most reasonable valuation we've seen in years. That doesn't negate the question of how they plan to turn a profit.
If they truly have 3.5 million databases, that's only ~$500 per database to recoup the investments, that doesn't seem to crazy. Companies like OpenAI or Twitter/X are never going to be profitable enough to cover what they've already spend/cost. Supabase could because the amount is so much lower and they have paying customer, but I'd like to emphasize the "could".
Acquisition. All of these VC companies raise unsustainable levels of money in hopes of acquisition or IPO. Supabase seems to be leaning towards acquisition.
and setting up postgresql on a simple VPS is so easy... You can literally ask Gemini 2.5 Pro or o3 or Sonnet 3.7 and do it in 15-30 minutes...
Learned helplessness is really something and vibe coding is overrated imo:
https://www.lycee.ai/blog/why-vibe-coding-is-overrated
Yes, but setting up e.g. users and pg_hba might be something you would need to research before doing your first postgres deployment even if you previously came from a managed postgres service.
Also coming up some sort of backup strategy would be a good idea.
But once you know these things, you could of course be faster.
What an absolute joke. Their exit strategy is presumably to keep chasing the high and find more ways to integrate AI. The era of building good software for fun and profit is coming to an end.
I think their product is sound, they build essentially a backend as a service platform on open-source software. That doesn't make it easy to run at scale, so you probably wanna use their paid offering unless you plan to hire a lot of staff to maintain it, but it is possible and they support small scale dev envs
Have you thought about possibly hiring a junior engineer to make the transition possible? I don't know what your use case but creating a solution that fits your needs would be worth it IMO. You're already spending a years worth of dev salary which can get you plenty of good talent around the world with.
What’s Supabase’s exit strategy? Are they sustainable long term as a standalone business?
You can also see how money is starting to chase “vibe coding” — as long as you say the magic words, even if your product is only tangentially related to it, you can get funding!