Supabase

Supabase is a developer platform built around Postgres. Each Supabase project is a full Postgres database plus a set of services around it: authentication, auto-generated APIs, file storage, realtime subscriptions, edge functions, and vector search through the pgvector extension. The company positions it as an open-source alternative to Firebase, but the core difference is that your data lives in standard Postgres, so you can query it with SQL, move it with ordinary Postgres tools, and avoid a proprietary data model.

Who it is for: Supabase is popular with startups, solo developers and product teams who want a production database and backend without running servers. It is also a common backend for apps generated by AI app builders and coding agents, which makes its tooling and safety defaults relevant to anyone automating development work.

Key products: - Database: managed Postgres with extensions, branching, backups and a SQL editor. - Auth: email, magic link, OAuth and phone sign-in, tied to Postgres row-level security. - Storage: file storage with access policies. - Edge Functions: server-side TypeScript functions deployed close to users. - Realtime: change streams and presence over websockets. - Vector: embeddings storage and similarity search for AI features. - Supabase CLI: local development, migrations, type generation and deployment from the terminal or CI.

Pricing type: freemium. There is a free tier for small projects and paid plans that scale with usage and compute; check the official pricing page for current numbers. Most of the platform is open source and can be self-hosted.

Alternatives: Firebase (Google), Neon and other serverless Postgres providers, PlanetScale, Appwrite, Convex, and running Postgres yourself on a cloud provider such as AWS RDS.

Why builders follow it: changes to Supabase defaults ripple into many CI pipelines and agent workflows at once. In November 2026, for example, Supabase CLI v3 made local the default target for database commands and required confirmation for every hosted change.

Official site: https://supabase.com