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.

Could be wrong though.

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?

So if you assume their revenue is in that range, you're looking at 66x to 133x ARR multiple. In today's market that's quite a big markup. Standard SaaS right now is probably more like 5-15x. AI is a lot more (but Supabase isn't AI). But they are a key leader in their market, so probably get a meaningful bonus for that. And I'm sure a lot of big industry investors were competing against each other for the Supabase deal, so that definitely would have helped valuation too. Also, at their maturity today, they are probably showing some great success signing big enterprise deals and telling a story about how that will grow.

That being said, those factors alone don't answer 66-133x. Perhaps Supabase's strongest angle is their opportunity for product-led growth:

- They have a huge number of people on a free tier

- The growth rate of free tier users might be accelerating

- The conversion rate of free tier users to paid users might also be increasing

- They're adding more things that people can pay for, increasing LTV of customers. e.g., for my business, we probably 20x our Supabase cost in the last 6 months - most of that is due to our growth but also there are a lot of things we can buy from Supabase beyond compute.

So I would assume, in addition to the above, they're telling a story about their actual revenue growth rate will accelerate meaningfully because of all of these factors working together.

Lots of assumptions in here, but you can start to see how a lot of different factors + a hype multiple could lead to such a valuation.

[1] https://getlatka.com/companies/supabase.com#revenue

[2] https://leadiq.com/c/supabase/5ed1e4778a998f161ef62998

Making it easy for engineers, experienced OR aspiring is huge.

A non-technical family member is working on a tech project, and giving them Lovable.dev with Supabase as a backend was like complete magic. No amount of fiddling with terminals or propping up postgres is too little.

We technical people always underestimate how fast things change when non-technical users can finally get things done without opening the hood.

They are great products that covers 95% of what CRUD APIs do without hacks. They’re great tools in the hands of engineers.

To me it’s not about vibe coding or AI. It is pointless to reinvent the wheel on every single CRUD backend ever.

It is good to get started and no doubt useful for simple CRUD apps. But once you want to start doing more complicated stuff, a lot of the RLS primitives become very hard to maintain and test, for example. You could say that that's Postgres's fault, but Supabase strongly pushes you in that direction.

The tooling, while looking quite polished, just felt pretty half baked along with docs (at least a year ago when we pulled the plug). Try to implement even a halfway complicated permissions scheme with it and RLS and you are in for a world of hurt and seemingly unmaintainable code.

So we ditched Supabase Auth for AuthJS, and are using vanilla postgres with Prisma. That's worked well for us. All the tooling is relatively mature, it's easy to write tests, etc.

Maybe if AI is writing some of the code, it might get easier, but for now, I'm avoiding Supabase like the plague until I see a project that's relatively complex that's actually easy to maintain.

My experience of supabase really demonstrates to me that the ideals of all of the postgres layer technologies - postrest, realtime via wal, jwt auth in the db -, just don't make for an easy experience. It all works (mostly) but I find it more annoying than useful and have to work around it more often than I'd like. I suppose I'm old school, but just building the things that one needs is often more robust and less work than trying to plug into what they've provided.

I really don't know what they're going to do with a series D. It seems they now _have_ to go for a high-value exit, but I really don't see which company would provide that exit.

Has anything changed recently? ~1year ago I installed a local instance (that I still use today for logging LLM stats) and IIRC all I had to do was "docker compose up". All the dockers are still starting for me at boot from that 1yo install, to this day. (I use it on 127.0 so no SSE & stuff, perhaps that's where the pain points are? Dunno, but for my local logging needs it's perfect).

And I believe both Supabase and Vercel run all their services on AWS anyways, so AWS gets paid no matter what.