It's Postgres, but bundled with some extensions and Postgrest

it's just a firebase competitor, that's based on postgres and you can run sql against it if you want.

Not really a confusing story: it's a PaaS that wants to beat fears of becoming another Parse ( https://www.willowtreeapps.com/craft/parse-shutdown-what-it-... ) Realistically 99% of the users would still be screwed if they ever shut down, regardless of if it's open (see: Parse)... but it gives people a some confidence to hear they're building on a platform that they could (strictly in theory) spin up their own instance of should a similar rug pull ever occur

You are not wrong that it’s a postgres + extensions. However, the tech market is very big now and that can sustain these valuations.

I really love supabase. And I’m glad they are getting some funding because I’m terrified they’ll get bought by Amazon or google and completely ruined. The developer experience is first rate. It’s like they just read my mind and made everything I need really easy. - Deals with login really nicely - Databases for data - Storage for files - Both of those all nicely working with permissions - Realtime is v cool - Great docs - Great SDK - Great support peeps Please never sell out.

The product story is that people want to build apps and naturally find themselves having to handle: - remote state - authoritative logic that can't run solely on the user's device because you can't trust it - authentication each of which is annoying when you're focused on building the user-facing app experience. Supabase solves all three without you needing to touch any infrastructure. The self-hosting thing just provides insurance that users are not completely locked in to their platform, which is a big concern when you're outsourcing basically your entire backend stack.

Totally agree. I read all kinds of articles and posts and asked for opinions and explanations, to see if I should use Supabase to build a back end for a mobile app. In the end I jumped into it wholeheartedly, mainly because I wanted a canned solution for authorization and user-confirmation. But soon I came up against obstacles I had easily overcome with plain Deno already, but were seemingly insurmountable with Supabase. When one basic use-case after another turned out to be almost wholly undocumented and unexplored by the Supabase docs and community, I concluded that Supabase is really only suited for people building Web back-ends that let people browse a database. As an application back-end, its marquee features don't add value or are basically irrelevant... as far as I can see. The rest of it is incomplete and/or undocumented, with client libraries being an example.