The team at Supabase has an excellent vision and execution. This time is no different. Release week is this week and they released plenty of features dripping throughout one single week – resulting in a lot of continued attention to the product. The Twitter meta-verse was amazed by yet another excellent news: the Supabase Studio admin dashboard has been released as open-source for self-hosting and local development. Let's see what this is all about.

What is Supabase?

It's basically a hosted Postgres Database with an authentication module, instant APIs, realtime subscriptions and object storage. They market it as the open-source alternative to Firebase. It's got fewer features but the release cycle is fast and efficient, they focus on the most value for the least effort, as any organization would aim for if there weren't external injections in the roadmap.

Why should I care?

The tools and frameworks to take a Saas, online community, data-backed web or mobile application off the ground are countless, yet a good research and trial and error is required to get the stack right. Supabase has scalability and the basic functions backed in. If you are aiming for a Next.JS app then the quick start guide gets you started in less than an hour.

If your aim is a web app with user authentication and stripe payments, in 1 hour you can get it off the ground with support for recurring payments, secure user authentication and email notifications, magic links, etc.

What's Supabase good at?

It's basically a backend as a service, you can sign up with your GitHub user and launch projects, each project is a dedicated PostgreSQL database with Row Level Security (as the database is public by definition), a Real Time API and User authentication. You get 500MB of database space for free and a generous number of API requests, user authentications and object storage. For $25 / month you get up to 8GB of database storage (which is difficult to fill), 100,000 authenticated users and more. I'd say the pricing is spot on for the needs of a small project and a professional project.

The idea is to skip building the user authentication, database and API stack altogether. Any web and mobile application that requires a backend and manages users can be jumpstarted by launching a free Supabase project in a couple of minutes. You'll get the API key to work with the Supabase library in a React project, for example, plus admin access to the PostgreSQL instance if needed. It's worth noticing that this is a full PostgreSQL instance with triggers and row level security, you can build and execute functions in it unlike many other databases as a service.

Supabase Studio

The open source approach makes Supabase even more interesting as an alternative to Firebase. The release two days ago of the Supabase Studio dashboard makes it possible to create custom deployments that work with large PostgreSQL deployments, enterprise-level applications that require an on-premises database, or a specific security requirement. It also means that the Supabase Studio can be extended or customized to the needs of commercial application developments and represents yet another shortcut to deliver a functional data management dashboard.

It's currently an early release which means that some functionalities available in the hosted version are not available at the moment, but the roadmap includes building a mirror version of the hosted platform into the self-hosted one. The team noted that they just recently had to move from a monorepo approach to dedicated repos for achieving the split, and it took them some time.

The next steps look amazing and we should keep an eye on them. The team has build Supabase Studio on Next.JS, Tailwind CSS, MobX and Radix. The stack is very popular and appreciated at the moment, allowing to get the Supabase Studio integrated in many projects easily.

The repo is here , and I can't wait to get building with it.