Supabase is a hosted Postgres backend that generates REST and GraphQL APIs straight from your schema, plus built-in auth and real-time subscriptions. The free tier comes with 500 MB and 50,000 monthly active users, and Pro starts at $25 per month with $10 in compute credits included.
Who Supabase Suits
Pick Supabase if you're building a solo project or small team product and want to avoid infrastructure overhead. You get real SQL, the REST and GraphQL APIs save days of boilerplate, and auth is not bolted on. The free tier actually works for early development and small side projects. It's also good for teams with Postgres expertise who want a managed backend without Docker orchestration.
Where It Falls Short
The free plan pauses your project after seven days without activity, which wrecks demos and requires manual intervention to unpause. Billing confusion is a major pain point: a Pro plan shows $25 a month, but that comes with only $10 in compute credits, so a second project costs $35 minimum. The jump from Pro ($25) to Team ($599) is absurd, with nothing in between for small teams. Edge Functions run on Deno instead of Node, so some npm packages require workarounds. Schema branching, which lets you test schema changes against a copy of production, remains in beta and flaky.
Alternatives Worth Considering
Neon and PlanetScale are the main competitors. Both offer serverless Postgres variants (Neon uses native Postgres branches, PlanetScale uses MySQL with Postgres coming), and both have more granular team pricing. If you don't need the auto-generated APIs or built-in auth and want a pure database, either could be a better fit.