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Latent Space · 3 min · Oct 28, 2026

A launch forced Supabase to migrate 800 databases in YC

Supabase changed its positioning to an open-source Firebase alternative just before a launch sent users from 8 to 800. The team burned through cloud credits and spent its first YC week moving all 800 databases.

PC

Paul Copplestone

Co-founder & CEO, Supabase

  • Shawn Wang (swyx), Host · Co-founder, AI Engineer

    Wrote “The Rise of the AI Engineer” and founded Smol AI, maker of AI News.

About this segment

Supabase changed its positioning to an open-source Firebase alternative just before a launch sent users from 8 to 800. The team burned through cloud credits and spent its first YC week moving all 800 databases.

From “Why Agents Love Supabase — with Paul Copplestone and Ant Wilson”, Oct 28, 2026. Watch the full episode

“We went from eight to eight hundred on that, that launch alone.”
PCPaul Copplestoneat 24:25 · Latent Space24:25

Takeaways Pro pick

  1. The original tagline, real-time Postgres, failed to attract users.
  2. A Firebase-alternative positioning helped drive a launch from 8 to 800 users.
  3. The team migrated 800 databases after exhausting DigitalOcean credits.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 41:29Supabase measures sales by incremental customer growth4:46
  2. 59:07Declarative schemas give agents a direct view of database state3:06

  3. 23:09A launch forced Supabase to migrate 800 databases in YCPro pick 3:01

  4. 5 more moments in the full episode
Up next · All-InHow 13 counts and a point system turned into an 11-year sentencePro pick 3:04

Transcript

From the transcript Latent Space publishes with the episode.

  1. 23:22

    We weren't ready to be launched on Hacker News. And you didn't consider yourself a Firebase alternative. Oh, yeah. So that was the day that we changed the tagline. We had the tagline- What was the original tagline? It was real-time Postgres- Ah... because what had happened was I wanted, like, we, we were like, "Oh, let's build a Postgres company," but in my previous company, I had to migrate from Firebase to Postgres, but I needed a real-time f- feature, and so I ended up building this real-time engine on top of Postgres.

  2. 23:47

    And so we thought, "Oh, that's the killer thing. Like, it's getting some open source traction. This real-time engine is kinda cool." So we were like, "Oh, real-time Postgres." No one cared. No one cared when we had a website, and so, like, we were like, "Let's change it to open source Firebase alternative," knowing that that was the reason why I switched. And it was, I think, only 12 hours later or something like that- Yeah, yeah... that this article went up. Yeah Yeah. Still the top of all time.

  3. 24:11

    And at the time, we were s- running on top of DigitalOcean, and every new database was two droplets. So two $5 a month droplets. [laughs] Why two? Um, one for the, uh, database and one for the APIs. [laughs] Right. Because we- 'Cause we wanted to upgrade the APIs and decouple- Independently, yeah. And we only had a handful of, like, test users at that point. Yeah, yeah. And then all of a sudden we were- I think we only had eight users. Yeah. We went from eight to eight hundred on that, that launch alone. Yeah. And then we burned through...

  4. 24:42

    I think we had, like, 10K of Digital, uh, Ocean credits, which we just burned through in basically 48 hours. Um, and then we'd just gone into YC, so AWS was like, "Oh, we'll give you," you know, whatever it was, "150K in credits if you migrate to us." And so we spent the first week of being in YC migrating 800 databases to a different cloud, which, you know, if you've ever migrated one database, you know how painful it is.

  5. 25:08

    It's like migrating 800 is not how you wanna spend your first [laughs] week in YC. That's crazy. Do you remember that we could have been on Digital-- Like, bas- basically, we should still be building on DigitalOcean, 'cause when you get into YC, they have this credits program, like, huge number of credits f- on DigitalOcean at the time. And we're like, "Hey, can we have these credits? Because we're, like, we're blowing up here." And they said, "Oh, no, you've already used the $10,000 credit program.

  6. 25:32

    We can't give you this other one for three hundred thousand." So we're like, "Well, we have to migrate to AWS." [laughs] And so the biggest lost opportunity of DigitalOcean ever- Being too strict, yeah... didn't-- I know our bills with AWS now, this is, like- Nothing... probably one of their biggest customers ever that they lost- Yeah... from being too strict about that. But because it was COVID, it was a time when everyone was worried about, like, what's- Yeah... gonna happen. True. So I think they were like, "We don't wanna overextend ourselves." Um- It's fair. Yeah. Yeah.