3:49 "i never used these services, but I know quite a few people that did", so yeah, he's just shit talking on them and never had his hands on these technologies..
I disagree about disconsidering supabase like that... It's not just Saas, it's opensource, self hosting it on cost effective providers like contabo or webdock is still worth it as long as managing the server yourself is not a problem.
@@cas818028 I don't think it's overhyped, yeah one of my project has around 1000 MAU, and supabase is handling it's just fine and it is because of this hype the competition of "MOST GENEROUS DATABASE" is changing so much things. Plus in UI Supabase and Planetscale are winners for me
Supabase is great. It's open source and you can self host if you want to. Under the hood it's all docker services with open source tools. With your stack can would never be able to leave AWS.
Most people say their self-hosted version is super limited and very buggy, though? And if I'm not getting the convenience of a hosted click/drag-drop platform, why would I use Supabase to begin with?
@@SimonHoibergExplains very buggy self hosted? it's docker images! The docker images are the exact same ones they use for the hosted service. At the last event they pushed a new feature every day and the docker image versions were updated. There is no limited version repo for self hosted. The drag and drop comes from supabase studio docker image. You are also free to use pgadmin as well for managing your Postgres. I think I understand your problem with Supabase. You guys were working directly off production and didn't run supabase start to develop with a local copy. Then you ran a query that you lagged your clusters and you blamed it on their hosting service, because you had no idea if the same queries would crash your local stack. Did you move the same Postgres queries to AWS with zero problems? Supabase also just added new features to analyze queries and detect slow or insecure queries. The best thing about supabase is it's open source. I am not locked in. With AWS if they want to double their prices what would you do?
@@SimonHoibergExplains To save some time, I'd start with supabase, but with a self-hosted version pre-configured and ready to re-wire things up at any time!
Our Supabase selfhosted instance is fully-featured and runs with everything on the platform. It took a week to get it ready for a production setup - I wouldn't consider selfhosting easy if you don't have any experience with infra topics. We moved to selfhosted about 4 months ago we're heavily using realtime & PostGREST. But I agree on the problems with the PaaS blackbox part. Really scary when one of your instances just doesn't work anymore and there's nothing you can do.
The funny part is that there are a lot of cases with AWS S3 and cloudfront that they get ddosed too leading devs with thousands of dollars invoices even though they use WAF security 😅
1:52 “All the infrastructure has been conveniently abstracted away from you so when something doesn’t work beyond the basic UI, there’s nothing you can do about it” The same thing could be said about No-Code solutions as well. If you want to trade convenience you’ll have to sacrifice control
Yes, definitely. No Code tools has it's clear limitations too. With Vercel and Supabase you get many of those same limitations but not really any of the benefits from No Code.
The same can be said about public clouds. Honestly it's surprising to hear that clouds give you control, because their business is actually abstracting complexity and details from you.
@@SimonHoibergExplains That''s how everything is in the world🤣,for example : You don't plant a car factory just to produce your daily driver (ref: no users) and you will still need parts from several companies even if you plant a car manufacturing plant (ref: more than no users)
@@SimonHoibergExplains With most "No-Code" solutions, you lose more control than with something like Supabase and much more control than with something like Heroku.
Having that experience totally sucks! But what this video is failing to mention is that in all the cases on serverless horrors with Vercel, they refunded all the costs to the customer. They now have a better DDOS protection with the newly released firewall - something that should have been there from the beginning!
I don't believe they did, no? That's the whole point of their stories. And if they did eventually end up doing it, it was because of the tremendous backlash they were getting. Imagine all the cases that didn't get traction, where people just sucked it up and payed.
@@SimonHoibergExplains All the incidients mentioned in this video were entirely refunded, including that last 5k from the Netlify one. Does that excuse the BS initial bill? No, but it should be mentioned still.
The thing is I've seen those articles but they seem to only occur for large cases. Admittedly I haven't seen too many, but I've seen recent cases of people not getting refunded because their voice just wasn't loud enough for someone not on autopilot to actually evaluate the situation. This seems reasonable if you consider that even in the big cases, vercel tries to still make you pay for some of the insane server costs until it goes public.
Vercel released DDOS mitigation for all plans, in March, 3 months before you published this video, but you didn’t mention this feature when referencing the tweet at 4:00, which was published in February, before the feature was available. It seems unreasonable to criticise Vercel for not having a feature without also mentioning that the feature has now been available for 3 months. If you were specifically criticising Vercel for not having the feature earlier, then fair enough, but that’s not how you presented it.
That's the problem of using stuff before their General Avaliablity phase like with supabsae... You really shouldn't use it for mission-critical websites to that moment.
You don't need a senior DevOps. You can learn it 😁 At least, for "small" SaaS setups, you can absolutely managed this yourself. AWS prices are very generous - an example here: www.threads.net/@simonhoiberg/post/C7g2bSCsp-w
Experienced ops will be able to setup basic infra in 3-5 days. Frontend? Route53 + CloudFront + S3, all deployed with Terraform or CDK/ts + CI/CD pipelines on Github Actions. Backend? Serverless with CDK or fargate k8s with helm / kustomize or even aws amplify. If you know what you're doing it's really not a big deal.
Supabase still makes a lot of sense for those who are limited on cash and expertise but needs to test run a business. Besides you can host it yourself when you’re are ready.
Totally disagree. AWS is much cheaper, easier to navigate and doesn't break. If you're a new businesses with limited cash, you most certainly should not use these services.
Completely agree with the sentiment of this video. This is one reasons why I avoid these types services as I don't feel comfortable not being in control. Personally I find AWS, Azure and Google Cloud too complicated for indie developers. I'm a happy Digital Ocean customer along with Hetzner which feels like the right balance of giving me control, without overloading me with jargon, settings, permissions, etc.
I think it's great that you also tell the "dark side" of those tools. But what about Xano? Any experience with that one, as I have only heard good things about Xano so far.
What a bad video to do. Your target audience are mostly people starting a business or having a business in the early stage. To simply expect beginners going enterprise-level with AWS and certain stacks is just mindblowing. Especially not those who are testing the waters of certain market and product fit. There are horror stories of AWS, Stripe you name it - there are everywhere. Serverless is enough to get started and rise and that's for what they serve purpose for.
actually his channel wouldn't appeal too much to someone just starting out. It fits those who have already peeled out a few layers. Someone just starting will usually struggle with using something as simple as wordpress. His channel is the greatest source of relevant no bullshit content.
If you can't figure out that this video is not for building landing page or MVP then that's your problem. If you're a beginner, then just use webflow or wordpress. Hope that make sense.
Are you crazy? AWS is the most popular cloud hosting service in the world. I'm a full time 17 year old student and I learnt how to use AWS in order to start building my SaaS with no problem at all. Also you don't have to go "enterprise level" - you can just start with a simple relational database hosting and you'll be on your way.
I am in agreement with the above replies. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to use Aws or Google. I'm a beginner to cloud but have a lot of experience deploying on WordPress and other CMS style static site hosting. Making the switch to apps on cloud is something that I'm just beginning to understand, and it's clear to me that at the very least I'd be overpaying if I went with these middleware cloud providers. And I would still suffer the risk of having an out-of-pocket experience, except with no control over how to fix it. Why pay more for less? When was the last time customer support made anything easier in life? Give me my tools and access to the code and if I hang myself, at least that's on me 😂
I dont understand the usecase behind supabase, for most use cases its just a package of database and data viewer. Most projects are well off by putting the database on an EC2/ECS and then managing it accordingly
Thank you for your opinion and fair enough for your situation. I'm a developer aspiring to be an entrepreneur but I have a comfortable job right now and indie hacking in the evenings. My choice is Supabase because I'm against cloud vendor lock-ins. However I will be self hosting and contributing to the code repo to get the Supabase setup to suit my needs. Thanks to my job it allows me to take it slow for now. Anyways thanks for your video! Thanks to you I'll definitely not go for the hosted option :D
Computes, cdns, etc are all really cheap from these cloud providers. The only reason why you’d go for something like vercel is that if you cant spend a day learning to deploy to aws, gcp, azure, etc. Database though is different. I find supabase to be very cost efficient if you’re just starting out
I think for a first time founder and a single developer, these platforms are great. In aws you have to figure a lot of stuff out. If you are a single person building an mvp you will forever be stuck in making the app rather than launching it.
But with this logic, you might as well go ahead and use Bubble, Flutterflow, Wized, or another No Code tools instead? If you're at MVP level, you can save yourself much more time by not coding at all.
I am learning to code myself to make myself more and more independent from nocode services. I love your message in this video. I would love to watch a video you explaining what exactly the boilerplate does and how the same looks in these nocode services to connect the dots in my 🧠. On this note, I heard someone say that backend code is not really harder then frontend code but it often seems like backend is this crazy stuff
I have a video explaining my SaaS boilerplate in details right here: ruclips.net/video/SUjTIX0a1PM/видео.html And yes, definitely agree. Back end and front end are equally hard to manage now.
Hi Simon. I totally agree, i don't ever see myself using vercel or other similar services for when i build larger projects with many users. Do you have any resources of tutorials you would recommend for us to get started on learning how to use aws or other similar services?
What stack do you use now? I'm building my own little startup and use supabase. But i'm still kind of hesitant because of its pricing model and performance.. I do host on AWS amplify, but I i search AWS for databases they are expensive AF. So which setup do you use for your app? Side note: my app will have a lot of concurrent connections during peak hours, mostly weekends. Not sure if that will influence my stack choices?
So, how much did you spend for hiring those system admin, database admiin, network admin and technical team to maintain your infrastructure? Who's to call when the incident happens again?
There is no excuse for not having a spending limit of any of the cloud platforms. Yes I understand it may be delayed, but $1-2k bill is not $100k bill.
I have to come in here and say that I've been deploying on a lot of platforms and Render has been incredibly reasonable to me. If your code is good, you get so so much for $7 a month it's kinda insane. The rest of them, I completely agree with what you said, but I think that if you're running a tech company of any kind Render is the way to go.
Hello. Quick question is it reliable to self-host supabase to get all the niceties out of the box? just how reliable is it compared to custom built rewrite of the entire services it already provides? basically can you trust supabase?
@@hoeszyslak6989 Firstly I’m software engineer and o can understand most of things that happing in my supabase self hosted services that’s why I can’t say that i will face these similar issues, The comparison between supabase and raw code is not fair for many points, one of them is TTC ( time to customer ), rewriting everything from scratch can delay the time to launch and take time from another tasks that i can do to marketing my product. Then once the product becomes viable and gets me revenues, then i can have time and money to decide is supabase a long term solution. Since supabase is open source and recently announced as production ready, I can say that i trust it.
@@oussamachanii3480 even self hosted? like all business logic and services are custom made but like supabase is just used for user auth and permissions? how is that not reliable than say using the batteries that come with django?
Looks like you never faced the issue with AWS EC2 when their services work like Supabase case in your video. When you re-boot the server everything is working but then in a few days, the instance is dead. So, you have to restart the instance or redeploy everything to another instance. I would say it is a rare cases 2-3 cases in 10 years but they are exist ;)
Thanks for the tips Simon, super useful! 🙏 I’m a lead ux/ui designer with basic front end skills and I’ve used webflow for simple designs in the past but when it comes to building a micro-sass, do you recommend learning full stack and just building it from scratch? Thanks again for all that you do.
I recommend getting into some coding, yes. If you have no coding experience at all, becoming a full stack developer is quite a lot to learn. But I would start by getting some basic experience with coding, and in the meantime, use tools like Bubble - it's excellent. At some point, you could team up with an experienced software engineer to build out a full product, and as a lead ux/ui with some experience in coding (enough to speak the language), you can definitely create something really great!
Whatever suits your needs, though I'm using AWSs managed services a lot (DynamoDB, Fargate, Lambda, etc). They're great for a lot of cases and still gives you a lot of control.
Dynamo is absolutely horrible when you need to start doing dynamic querying or complex querying or even pagination. Learned this the hard way and had to migrate to documented. Luckily this was achievable in a weekend with ChatGPT. On paper and pricing dynamo would seem like a great option. In reality it will come to bite you quickly
You paid supabase because you used their hosting for it, what if you hosted your own supabase database? Would it still have the same issue? I am worried because I am thinking I will have to use it but in my own hosting, wondering if I will have any issues with it.
I would say this and keep saying this again: Taking your time to learn tiny bit how AWS, GCP etc work (even via thin layer of abstraction like Terraform) basically means you're paying your infra cost upfront. And everyone knows it's cheapest to pay things upfront. It's not rocket science guys, the "AWS is Hard" is, while partially true, are exagerrated. If you can understood complex CSS you can understood AWS
Love Supabase!! Yes every service / team can make mistakes. DBs fail all the time - the diff is in how responsive and professional they are in handling it. Supabase is amazing 🔥
Simon, do you believe this is an issue with all the PaaS/BaaS? Or is it just Vercel & Supabase? I’ve had my fair share of headaches with AWS as well - especially EKS. Running VMs or serverless - never had an issue. But EKS kept me awake at night multiple times. I’ve issues with CNI, SGs, Roles and everything you can think of that composes AWS ecosystem. Aurora serverless, multi-region replication of ECR, Amazon MQ. You name it. Anything I used that is Amazon specific, I’ve had issues. Plus, there are open source alternatives to Supabase, such as Parse.
I would argue you don't use them for hobby projects too. The more you refine and become an expert on your personal tech stack and workflows, the quicker and more control you will have in the long run.
I get the fact that you can use AWS & GCP for scaling purposes, but can't you make the same argument for them and VPS/bare metal? 1 infrastructure engineer how knows Terraform, Kubernetes and Docker can get you whole system running for even less money. And now your only problem is electricity 😂. It probably boilds down to the level of control you want to have over your SaaS, but there are people who have lowered their costs by 20+% on a 50-60k MRR SaaS by moving to bare metal from the cloud.
AWS can be subject to ddos. You can get a good fat bill and must pay it if they decide it is your fault. Aws is just a little better than Vercel. Get a VPS.
I would even go so far and say you made just another mistake again by moving to AWS, in my opinion I would in your case just rent a VPS for a fixed 50$ per month and I bet it would be enaugh for you.
Not that I support their billing vision/strategy, but the issue of Vercel's customer that got DDOS'd was properly acted on by Vercel, and in reasonable time I find. There are risks with any type of technology choice. It is up to you, as the engineer, to ensure you are tolerant to that amount of risk. When your application scales, you should invest in transitioning into providers/technologies that would offer better control for your liking. If you don't, and the "risk" ultimately materializes, then you would not be within your rights to blame and push other devs away from said services/technologies that are proven to be GREAT for smaller teams and smaller scale projects. Just my two cents. I love your other content regardless of my sentiment to this video. Cheers!
I am in several framework arenas. Laravel or Ruby on Rails or Django for admin backends and NodeJS for APIs due to its speed. I burst out laughing when Aaron Francis mentioned "Frankenstein Framework" in one of his videos. He was obviously referring to the JavaScript community which lacks those battle tested frameworks.
I would but the only problem is PHP and you will convince nobody in the JS backend scene to write PHP again and leave all modern JavaScript behind, there is 0 chance this happens.
@@brainites there are some battle tested frameworks like Laravel in the JS ecosystem, Adonis.js may be the best one. It's Laravel, but in Typescript, instead of PHP
the supabase blame seems unwarranted given the circumstances. kiwicopple mentioned it's due to out-of-memory (OOM) and is likely an application-level problem, which check outs technically, and puts the ball back in the developer's court. I'm not sure how one can blame Supabase for application-level issues, when their purpose is to provide infra. however, I will say, the server should have auto-restarted (it's supposed to) when it hit OOM, instead of requiring manual intervention. i've had the same reoccurring OOM issues while running a Prod EB instance on AWS, but it was of my own fault, to which I refactored my backend to fix it. and for the record, I haven't used Supabase in prod yet - been an AWS guy for years but recently have been thinking about going to Supabase. so my question really is, was it an issue with supabase, or just a skill issue on the application-level?
I cannot say for sure. But going from "we don't know what's causing it" to "it's likely an application-level issue" seems to be a pretty random (though very convenient) link to make. All I can say is, we changed to AWS and everything has been running flawlessly. So no "application-level" issues after we changed infra at least 😉
No, I wouldn't count that. I think Firebase is similar to many AWS managed services like DynamoDB, AppSync, etc. You still have a completely different level of control.
@@SimonHoibergExplainsI don't follow. What's the difference between using Supabase auth and Firebase auth? Or Supabase edge functions and Azure functions? Or Supabase DB and CosmosDB (or any other managed database)? Honest question. I really like your content.
Try checking out Supabase on Reddit or search on Twitter and see for yourself how many people are having issues with it. "No one else encountered issues" is a wild statement 😂
@@SimonHoibergExplains issues like you experienced, where a project just crashes for 0 reasons and even support don't know what the reason is. You promote no code, which gives you 0 flexibility but yet supabase is problematic? Open source, self hostable and has a great development team which rapidly adds features.
I think the key to this video is that "when deploying, you need a certain level of competency or you will get burnt." This is something that a junior faces when they think something will "just work." Bad video
I haven't tried, but I hear it's very limited. Also, I personally don't see the point. You're using Supabase because it's an easy, one-click wayt to a database, right? Having to deal with self-hosting totally defeats the purpose.
Agree. It was not easy for me to setup. It has limitations in UI regarding auth providers setup, so you have to do it via env variables. In the end it just handy UI to Postgres. Also I wanna try authentication but afraid to be vendor-locked
I just don't see the point? The whole reason to use Supabase is convenience and ease - why would I bother self-hosting it? Besides, I hear there self-hosted solution is fairly limited and buggy (probably still in development)
@@SimonHoibergExplains You are right, I tried the self hosting version, it think it works just as PostgreSQL visual editor and REST api / GraphQL wrapper
Pulumi is the king for startups and SMEs. Takes some experimenting, but being able to create your own custom libraries for infrastructure is so powerful. I’ve got a Pulumi component that can deploy a container and attach to an API gateway in 5 lines of code. Since you can also turn this into templates, I can create and deploy a microservice in like 2 minutes. Would love to see you make a video about how you use it 🔥
This sounds like a “they made me mad so I’m gonna shit talk them” video
That's what it is. He was losing money and clients this is a fair reaction from him.
@@justafreak15able exactly. “From him”.
3:49 "i never used these services, but I know quite a few people that did", so yeah, he's just shit talking on them and never had his hands on these technologies..
@@qwerty-or1yg yeah it's crazy lol he's angry
Unlike you he presents very reasonable arguments.
I disagree about disconsidering supabase like that... It's not just Saas, it's opensource, self hosting it on cost effective providers like contabo or webdock is still worth it as long as managing the server yourself is not a problem.
PRs are a thing too
Supabase is trash. Way overhyped
@@cas818028 I don't think it's overhyped, yeah one of my project has around 1000 MAU, and supabase is handling it's just fine and it is because of this hype the competition of "MOST GENEROUS DATABASE" is changing so much things. Plus in UI Supabase and Planetscale are winners for me
I hear it's really difficult to self host. Supposedly Appwrite is much better for self hosting but I haven't tried either of them for that yet.
The worst self-hosting server, half of it is blocked, they don't explain anything, no desire to develop it... it's really crap, Supabase
Supabase is great. It's open source and you can self host if you want to. Under the hood it's all docker services with open source tools. With your stack can would never be able to leave AWS.
Supabase is great until you try to self-hosted yourself. It's quite limited, and realtime service just simply not working at all.
Most people say their self-hosted version is super limited and very buggy, though?
And if I'm not getting the convenience of a hosted click/drag-drop platform, why would I use Supabase to begin with?
@@SimonHoibergExplains very buggy self hosted? it's docker images! The docker images are the exact same ones they use for the hosted service. At the last event they pushed a new feature every day and the docker image versions were updated. There is no limited version repo for self hosted. The drag and drop comes from supabase studio docker image. You are also free to use pgadmin as well for managing your Postgres.
I think I understand your problem with Supabase. You guys were working directly off production and didn't run supabase start to develop with a local copy. Then you ran a query that you lagged your clusters and you blamed it on their hosting service, because you had no idea if the same queries would crash your local stack.
Did you move the same Postgres queries to AWS with zero problems? Supabase also just added new features to analyze queries and detect slow or insecure queries.
The best thing about supabase is it's open source. I am not locked in. With AWS if they want to double their prices what would you do?
@@SimonHoibergExplains To save some time, I'd start with supabase, but with a self-hosted version pre-configured and ready to re-wire things up at any time!
Our Supabase selfhosted instance is fully-featured and runs with everything on the platform. It took a week to get it ready for a production setup - I wouldn't consider selfhosting easy if you don't have any experience with infra topics.
We moved to selfhosted about 4 months ago we're heavily using realtime & PostGREST.
But I agree on the problems with the PaaS blackbox part. Really scary when one of your instances just doesn't work anymore and there's nothing you can do.
The funny part is that there are a lot of cases with AWS S3 and cloudfront that they get ddosed too leading devs with thousands of dollars invoices even though they use WAF security 😅
yup. WAF, their firewall will charge you for each request from DDOS
@@spicepiratewow this shouldn't be the case. Imagine charging per request
I've actually had this happen a few times, and AWS removed the entire bill, no questions asked.
@@jitxhere yes it is, just an example Web Dev Cody made a video about it. AWS do remove the bill if you ask them
@@SimonHoibergExplains how to you handle WAF currently in AWS or better to use Cloudflare
1:52 “All the infrastructure has been conveniently abstracted away from you so when something doesn’t work beyond the basic UI, there’s nothing you can do about it” The same thing could be said about No-Code solutions as well. If you want to trade convenience you’ll have to sacrifice control
Yes, definitely. No Code tools has it's clear limitations too.
With Vercel and Supabase you get many of those same limitations but not really any of the benefits from No Code.
The same can be said about public clouds. Honestly it's surprising to hear that clouds give you control, because their business is actually abstracting complexity and details from you.
@@SimonHoibergExplains That''s how everything is in the world🤣,for example : You don't plant a car factory just to produce your daily driver (ref: no users) and you will still need parts from several companies even if you plant a car manufacturing plant (ref: more than no users)
@@SimonHoibergExplains With most "No-Code" solutions, you lose more control than with something like Supabase and much more control than with something like Heroku.
Having that experience totally sucks! But what this video is failing to mention is that in all the cases on serverless horrors with Vercel, they refunded all the costs to the customer. They now have a better DDOS protection with the newly released firewall - something that should have been there from the beginning!
I don't believe they did, no? That's the whole point of their stories.
And if they did eventually end up doing it, it was because of the tremendous backlash they were getting. Imagine all the cases that didn't get traction, where people just sucked it up and payed.
@@SimonHoibergExplains All the incidients mentioned in this video were entirely refunded, including that last 5k from the Netlify one. Does that excuse the BS initial bill? No, but it should be mentioned still.
The thing is I've seen those articles but they seem to only occur for large cases. Admittedly I haven't seen too many, but I've seen recent cases of people not getting refunded because their voice just wasn't loud enough for someone not on autopilot to actually evaluate the situation. This seems reasonable if you consider that even in the big cases, vercel tries to still make you pay for some of the insane server costs until it goes public.
Vercel released DDOS mitigation for all plans, in March, 3 months before you published this video, but you didn’t mention this feature when referencing the tweet at 4:00, which was published in February, before the feature was available. It seems unreasonable to criticise Vercel for not having a feature without also mentioning that the feature has now been available for 3 months. If you were specifically criticising Vercel for not having the feature earlier, then fair enough, but that’s not how you presented it.
It's pitty that Simon omitted the important facts just to better suit his hate.
In general I like him, but this one is such a huge misstep.
Very interesting video! Curious if you have tried Nitric before? You can use pulumi or terraform under the hood to deploy to AWS or any other cloud.
That's the problem of using stuff before their General Avaliablity phase like with supabsae...
You really shouldn't use it for mission-critical websites to that moment.
Finally, some said it, I was telling this to my clients, but no one listen.
Last time I check just Senior DEVOPS costs more than $5000 a month + AWS + .....?
You don't need a senior DevOps. You can learn it 😁 At least, for "small" SaaS setups, you can absolutely managed this yourself.
AWS prices are very generous - an example here: www.threads.net/@simonhoiberg/post/C7g2bSCsp-w
To setup ec2 + rds + s3 you don't need a Devops. Also you can go with GCP wich is even easier to use.
Experienced ops will be able to setup basic infra in 3-5 days. Frontend? Route53 + CloudFront + S3, all deployed with Terraform or CDK/ts + CI/CD pipelines on Github Actions. Backend? Serverless with CDK or fargate k8s with helm / kustomize or even aws amplify. If you know what you're doing it's really not a big deal.
Amplify……
Terraform is actually very easy but most saas have enough with a simple vps
Supabase still makes a lot of sense for those who are limited on cash and expertise but needs to test run a business. Besides you can host it yourself when you’re are ready.
Totally disagree. AWS is much cheaper, easier to navigate and doesn't break.
If you're a new businesses with limited cash, you most certainly should not use these services.
@@SimonHoibergExplains "doesn't break." same stories you mentioned also happen in AWS
look at crazy lamda bills
Completely agree with the sentiment of this video. This is one reasons why I avoid these types services as I don't feel comfortable not being in control. Personally I find AWS, Azure and Google Cloud too complicated for indie developers. I'm a happy Digital Ocean customer along with Hetzner which feels like the right balance of giving me control, without overloading me with jargon, settings, permissions, etc.
Use VPS. Or better own your servers. People became too accustomed to convenience and comfort.
Thank you Simon, Just on time, I really appreciate your advise!
Trust me, AWS is not your friend
Of course not. I don't think anyone believes that.
I think it's great that you also tell the "dark side" of those tools. But what about Xano? Any experience with that one, as I have only heard good things about Xano so far.
What a bad video to do. Your target audience are mostly people starting a business or having a business in the early stage. To simply expect beginners going enterprise-level with AWS and certain stacks is just mindblowing. Especially not those who are testing the waters of certain market and product fit. There are horror stories of AWS, Stripe you name it - there are everywhere. Serverless is enough to get started and rise and that's for what they serve purpose for.
actually his channel wouldn't appeal too much to someone just starting out. It fits those who have already peeled out a few layers.
Someone just starting will usually struggle with using something as simple as wordpress.
His channel is the greatest source of relevant no bullshit content.
If you can't figure out that this video is not for building landing page or MVP then that's your problem.
If you're a beginner, then just use webflow or wordpress. Hope that make sense.
Are you crazy? AWS is the most popular cloud hosting service in the world. I'm a full time 17 year old student and I learnt how to use AWS in order to start building my SaaS with no problem at all. Also you don't have to go "enterprise level" - you can just start with a simple relational database hosting and you'll be on your way.
I am in agreement with the above replies. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to use Aws or Google. I'm a beginner to cloud but have a lot of experience deploying on WordPress and other CMS style static site hosting. Making the switch to apps on cloud is something that I'm just beginning to understand, and it's clear to me that at the very least I'd be overpaying if I went with these middleware cloud providers. And I would still suffer the risk of having an out-of-pocket experience, except with no control over how to fix it. Why pay more for less? When was the last time customer support made anything easier in life? Give me my tools and access to the code and if I hang myself, at least that's on me 😂
@@1000xdigitalIf your point was valid then our comment like numbers would be reversed.
I dont understand the usecase behind supabase, for most use cases its just a package of database and data viewer. Most projects are well off by putting the database on an EC2/ECS and then managing it accordingly
Thank you for your opinion and fair enough for your situation. I'm a developer aspiring to be an entrepreneur but I have a comfortable job right now and indie hacking in the evenings. My choice is Supabase because I'm against cloud vendor lock-ins. However I will be self hosting and contributing to the code repo to get the Supabase setup to suit my needs. Thanks to my job it allows me to take it slow for now. Anyways thanks for your video! Thanks to you I'll definitely not go for the hosted option :D
That's why I'm pro-code, but with code generation and templates to speed things up.
Absolutely 💯
I'm working on the same spectrum as well!
You attacked two cults in one video. Respect
😂
I host own server under vps system , i appriciate your effort to acknoledge topic
And he joined the AWS cult.
Computes, cdns, etc are all really cheap from these cloud providers. The only reason why you’d go for something like vercel is that if you cant spend a day learning to deploy to aws, gcp, azure, etc.
Database though is different. I find supabase to be very cost efficient if you’re just starting out
I think for a first time founder and a single developer, these platforms are great. In aws you have to figure a lot of stuff out. If you are a single person building an mvp you will forever be stuck in making the app rather than launching it.
But with this logic, you might as well go ahead and use Bubble, Flutterflow, Wized, or another No Code tools instead? If you're at MVP level, you can save yourself much more time by not coding at all.
Somebody has to set this kind of things and scratch this topics with honesty. Great video, great advice from the future experience. 🙌🏼
I appreciate it 🙌
I am learning to code myself to make myself more and more independent from nocode services. I love your message in this video. I would love to watch a video you explaining what exactly the boilerplate does and how the same looks in these nocode services to connect the dots in my 🧠.
On this note, I heard someone say that backend code is not really harder then frontend code but it often seems like backend is this crazy stuff
I have a video explaining my SaaS boilerplate in details right here: ruclips.net/video/SUjTIX0a1PM/видео.html
And yes, definitely agree. Back end and front end are equally hard to manage now.
@@SimonHoibergExplains oh you already have a video! You are awesome thanks 😊 🙏🏻
how about coolify? the open source version of vercel?
I believe it's the founder of Coolify that did serverlesshorrors, actually 😁
I haven't tried it, so can't say anything about it.
@@SimonHoibergExplains can't wait to see your video talking about it😁
You'd be responsible for all maintenance (db, os) and security.
Hi Simon. I totally agree, i don't ever see myself using vercel or other similar services for when i build larger projects with many users. Do you have any resources of tutorials you would recommend for us to get started on learning how to use aws or other similar services?
What stack do you use now? I'm building my own little startup and use supabase. But i'm still kind of hesitant because of its pricing model and performance..
I do host on AWS amplify, but I i search AWS for databases they are expensive AF. So which setup do you use for your app?
Side note: my app will have a lot of concurrent connections during peak hours, mostly weekends. Not sure if that will influence my stack choices?
So, how much did you spend for hiring those system admin, database admiin, network admin and technical team to maintain your infrastructure? Who's to call when the incident happens again?
All me, dude 😁 It's not that hard (for a SaaS my scale).
Supabase handles realtime subscriptions. How’d you handle it on your own? What kind of solution would you build?
AWS AppSync does too 😊
Google and learn.
@@SimonHoibergExplains Thanks! I’ll give it a try
@@ivan.jeremic asking professionals for advice on production-ready solutions counts as learning too :)
Convex
There is no excuse for not having a spending limit of any of the cloud platforms. Yes I understand it may be delayed, but $1-2k bill is not $100k bill.
Vercel didn't have one for the longest time
Mostly obsessed by the fact the steam from your coffee mug is a digital. Saw it a few videos back and now questioning all reality
I have to come in here and say that I've been deploying on a lot of platforms and Render has been incredibly reasonable to me. If your code is good, you get so so much for $7 a month it's kinda insane. The rest of them, I completely agree with what you said, but I think that if you're running a tech company of any kind Render is the way to go.
clear things and thick chocolate, really apreciate your transparenci, and your warning
I suggest you to host supabase containers in your server to control it instead of relying on their cloud services
Hello. Quick question is it reliable to self-host supabase to get all the niceties out of the box? just how reliable is it compared to custom built rewrite of the entire services it already provides? basically can you trust supabase?
@@hoeszyslak6989 Firstly I’m software engineer and o can understand most of things that happing in my supabase self hosted services that’s why I can’t say that i will face these similar issues, The comparison between supabase and raw code is not fair for many points, one of them is TTC ( time to customer ), rewriting everything from scratch can delay the time to launch and take time from another tasks that i can do to marketing my product. Then once the product becomes viable and gets me revenues, then i can have time and money to decide is supabase a long term solution.
Since supabase is open source and recently announced as production ready, I can say that i trust it.
Supabase is helpful only to reduce TTC, but at any other cases i don’t suggest to use it.
@@oussamachanii3480 even self hosted? like all business logic and services are custom made but like supabase is just used for user auth and permissions? how is that not reliable than say using the batteries that come with django?
Also it's weigh cheaper to use aws and it had higher free version on some of their services, looks good, thanks!
Nice content, thank you very much! I am subscribing for more!
tinykiwi is such a good brand name, how did you get it?, what's your though process?, i really love the name!
I acquired this company and kept the name 😁
So can't say I came up with it myself.
Looks like you never faced the issue with AWS EC2 when their services work like Supabase case in your video. When you re-boot the server everything is working but then in a few days, the instance is dead. So, you have to restart the instance or redeploy everything to another instance. I would say it is a rare cases 2-3 cases in 10 years but they are exist ;)
My goal one day is to be as brave as you.
Sometimes, the truth hurts... but it takes a bold person to stand by it!
I have a friend that got his AWS account closed down on short notice. Lost his trading bot
Thanks for the tips Simon, super useful! 🙏
I’m a lead ux/ui designer with basic front end skills and I’ve used webflow for simple designs in the past but when it comes to building a micro-sass, do you recommend learning full stack and just building it from scratch?
Thanks again for all that you do.
I recommend getting into some coding, yes. If you have no coding experience at all, becoming a full stack developer is quite a lot to learn.
But I would start by getting some basic experience with coding, and in the meantime, use tools like Bubble - it's excellent.
At some point, you could team up with an experienced software engineer to build out a full product, and as a lead ux/ui with some experience in coding (enough to speak the language), you can definitely create something really great!
Just for clarification, you tell us to go towards EC2, ECS, RDS, or you would still use the serverless from AWS (Lambdas, Dynamo,..) ?
Whatever suits your needs, though I'm using AWSs managed services a lot (DynamoDB, Fargate, Lambda, etc). They're great for a lot of cases and still gives you a lot of control.
Dynamo is absolutely horrible when you need to start doing dynamic querying or complex querying or even pagination. Learned this the hard way and had to migrate to documented. Luckily this was achievable in a weekend with ChatGPT. On paper and pricing dynamo would seem like a great option. In reality it will come to bite you quickly
You paid supabase because you used their hosting for it, what if you hosted your own supabase database? Would it still have the same issue?
I am worried because I am thinking I will have to use it but in my own hosting, wondering if I will have any issues with it.
What are your opinions on Firebase?
I would say this and keep saying this again:
Taking your time to learn tiny bit how AWS, GCP etc work (even via thin layer of abstraction like Terraform) basically means you're paying your infra cost upfront.
And everyone knows it's cheapest to pay things upfront.
It's not rocket science guys, the "AWS is Hard" is, while partially true, are exagerrated.
If you can understood complex CSS you can understood AWS
I wholeheartedly agree!
Love Supabase!! Yes every service / team can make mistakes. DBs fail all the time - the diff is in how responsive and professional they are in handling it.
Supabase is amazing 🔥
Simon, do you believe this is an issue with all the PaaS/BaaS? Or is it just Vercel & Supabase?
I’ve had my fair share of headaches with AWS as well - especially EKS. Running VMs or serverless - never had an issue. But EKS kept me awake at night multiple times. I’ve issues with CNI, SGs, Roles and everything you can think of that composes AWS ecosystem. Aurora serverless, multi-region replication of ECR, Amazon MQ. You name it. Anything I used that is Amazon specific, I’ve had issues.
Plus, there are open source alternatives to Supabase, such as Parse.
open source Supabase alternatives? What are you talking about? Supabase IS open source. You can self-host it, or even fork its code if you want
Is Firebase better as it is supported by Google?
How about Firebase. It’s basically Google Cloud simplified . Does it have these issues?
Everything has issues, there's no silver bullet.
Simon, finally the video I was waiting for! 💛 IaC ftw! 💪🏻
It had to be said 😁 IaC for sure!
Digital Ocean or Hetzner. Easier UI to work with and same VPS or dedicated servers supported as AWS.
Totaly agree with you 😊
I would argue you don't use them for hobby projects too. The more you refine and become an expert on your personal tech stack and workflows, the quicker and more control you will have in the long run.
Also don't restrict yourself to the big 3 cloud platforms, use more bare metal providers like Hetzner, digital Ocean, Linode/Akamai
Yes, that's a great point.
For me i use laravel forge for setting up all, you always can access the server by yourself
It doesn't matter the tool you use. You can have high bills in aws easily.
And great video, Simon. What about your main channel? Are you cooking something like your past video?
Yes 😁 I'm currently in the middle of a relocation, so my main office/studio is a bit in transit - but new content coming for my main channel soon!
@@SimonHoibergExplains I read on threats that you moved to spain, how has been your experience so far?
Thank you for enlightening a young SaaS entrepreneur brother, brother.
why not just use a $10 vps with sqlite in journaling mode. with 4 cores and eg 10ms for one req, you can handle up to 400 req/sec..
It's not a bad idea at all. I think many of AWS managed services is the sweet spot (slightly less overhead than a fully custom server).
I get the fact that you can use AWS & GCP for scaling purposes, but can't you make the same argument for them and VPS/bare metal? 1 infrastructure engineer how knows Terraform, Kubernetes and Docker can get you whole system running for even less money. And now your only problem is electricity 😂.
It probably boilds down to the level of control you want to have over your SaaS, but there are people who have lowered their costs by 20+% on a 50-60k MRR SaaS by moving to bare metal from the cloud.
Sure! You can take the argument all the way 😁 though, I think AWS/GCP is a very reasonable place to stop.
AWS can be subject to ddos. You can get a good fat bill and must pay it if they decide it is your fault. Aws is just a little better than Vercel. Get a VPS.
what about appwrite???????
I was about to ask the same, I use appwrite for every project and its been so cool an easy so far.
You coule even use coolify on aws and have your self hosted vercel
1:35 Ouch!! 😢😢🥲🥲
I would even go so far and say you made just another mistake again by moving to AWS, in my opinion I would in your case just rent a VPS for a fixed 50$ per month and I bet it would be enaugh for you.
It probably would. Though, personally I do think AWS is the perfect sweet spot where you get a lot of control and still save some overhead cost.
Not that I support their billing vision/strategy, but the issue of Vercel's customer that got DDOS'd was properly acted on by Vercel, and in reasonable time I find. There are risks with any type of technology choice. It is up to you, as the engineer, to ensure you are tolerant to that amount of risk. When your application scales, you should invest in transitioning into providers/technologies that would offer better control for your liking. If you don't, and the "risk" ultimately materializes, then you would not be within your rights to blame and push other devs away from said services/technologies that are proven to be GREAT for smaller teams and smaller scale projects. Just my two cents. I love your other content regardless of my sentiment to this video. Cheers!
How about Google firebase?
It has database, authentication, etc
Sure. I would say Firebase gives you the same granular control as AWS does. So personally, I'd say that's a good choice.
Seriously Simon, really appreciate your commitment to share your business / engineering insights with the world. Kudos!
The pleasure is all mine!
Don't use Stripe. They stopped my service without any proper reason.
Aws doesn't protect you from ddos too.
What about self hosting?
Man, just use Laravel and never look back again
I am in several framework arenas. Laravel or Ruby on Rails or Django for admin backends and NodeJS for APIs due to its speed. I burst out laughing when Aaron Francis mentioned "Frankenstein Framework" in one of his videos. He was obviously referring to the JavaScript community which lacks those battle tested frameworks.
I would but the only problem is PHP and you will convince nobody in the JS backend scene to write PHP again and leave all modern JavaScript behind, there is 0 chance this happens.
Sorry, I'm new to it, so I'm wondering where you would deploy then? Linode / Digital ocean?
@@minidragonlady Linode / Digital ocean. Yes. There are Hertzner and Contabo too that offer DDoS protection for free.
@@brainites there are some battle tested frameworks like Laravel in the JS ecosystem, Adonis.js may be the best one. It's Laravel, but in Typescript, instead of PHP
Really helpful.
An emotional stance. It's funny how AWS services also have their downsides. Can you imagine being charged for a status code of 4xx?
Using VPS or IaaS isn’t that hard. I agree
Would you be up for part 2 and dive into your pulumi setup?
I have an older one here where I go through my Pulumi setup 😁
ruclips.net/video/SUjTIX0a1PM/видео.html
You just cancel no code
even Netlify ? :'(
you cannot compare supabase and vercel. To diff things. Sad to see this video.
the supabase blame seems unwarranted given the circumstances. kiwicopple mentioned it's due to out-of-memory (OOM) and is likely an application-level problem, which check outs technically, and puts the ball back in the developer's court. I'm not sure how one can blame Supabase for application-level issues, when their purpose is to provide infra. however, I will say, the server should have auto-restarted (it's supposed to) when it hit OOM, instead of requiring manual intervention.
i've had the same reoccurring OOM issues while running a Prod EB instance on AWS, but it was of my own fault, to which I refactored my backend to fix it. and for the record, I haven't used Supabase in prod yet - been an AWS guy for years but recently have been thinking about going to Supabase.
so my question really is, was it an issue with supabase, or just a skill issue on the application-level?
I cannot say for sure.
But going from "we don't know what's causing it" to "it's likely an application-level issue" seems to be a pretty random (though very convenient) link to make.
All I can say is, we changed to AWS and everything has been running flawlessly. So no "application-level" issues after we changed infra at least 😉
What about Firebase? Or would that not count considering it is using google cloud under the hood?
No, I wouldn't count that. I think Firebase is similar to many AWS managed services like DynamoDB, AppSync, etc. You still have a completely different level of control.
@@SimonHoibergExplainsI don't follow. What's the difference between using Supabase auth and Firebase auth? Or Supabase edge functions and Azure functions? Or Supabase DB and CosmosDB (or any other managed database)?
Honest question. I really like your content.
@@bjornjansson7299 no diff he's just wrong
Coolify....Just Coolify.
I think the founder of Coolify is the person who did serverlesshorrors.com 😁
oh wow those stories are scary
Simon this template is "private"?
No it's definitely public 😊
@@SimonHoibergExplains You are amazing, know that boilerplate for outputs to Non-Technical Founder is a headache, and mine too!🤖
Supbase is way different, no one encountered something like you did while using it, so it's probably your fault.
Try checking out Supabase on Reddit or search on Twitter and see for yourself how many people are having issues with it. "No one else encountered issues" is a wild statement 😂
@@SimonHoibergExplains issues like you experienced, where a project just crashes for 0 reasons and even support don't know what the reason is. You promote no code, which gives you 0 flexibility but yet supabase is problematic? Open source, self hostable and has a great development team which rapidly adds features.
You can use coolify with aws and all is more simple for everyone, or you can put suoabase on aws server 😂
I think the key to this video is that "when deploying, you need a certain level of competency or you will get burnt." This is something that a junior faces when they think something will "just work." Bad video
What about running supabase on own server?
I haven't tried, but I hear it's very limited.
Also, I personally don't see the point. You're using Supabase because it's an easy, one-click wayt to a database, right?
Having to deal with self-hosting totally defeats the purpose.
Agree. It was not easy for me to setup. It has limitations in UI regarding auth providers setup, so you have to do it via env variables. In the end it just handy UI to Postgres. Also I wanna try authentication but afraid to be vendor-locked
How much AWS and Google pay this guy that he won’t stop yapping about their products 😂
What about Railway?
thanks for sharing this video.
What about self hosting supabase ?
I just don't see the point? The whole reason to use Supabase is convenience and ease - why would I bother self-hosting it?
Besides, I hear there self-hosted solution is fairly limited and buggy (probably still in development)
@@SimonHoibergExplains
You are right,
I tried the self hosting version, it think it works just as PostgreSQL visual editor and REST api / GraphQL wrapper
I would just do PocketBase if self-hosting, should be a lot less complicated
Maybe Supabase just doesn't like you because you keep calling them Superbase
😂
Pulumi is the king for startups and SMEs. Takes some experimenting, but being able to create your own custom libraries for infrastructure is so powerful. I’ve got a Pulumi component that can deploy a container and attach to an API gateway in 5 lines of code. Since you can also turn this into templates, I can create and deploy a microservice in like 2 minutes. Would love to see you make a video about how you use it 🔥
Yeah, I absolutely love it too 😁
I have one right here, in fact: ruclips.net/video/SUjTIX0a1PM/видео.html
What do you mean by Not suitable for children 😅😅
I know these stuff is from and to Senior Developer and Entrepreneurs 😊
Would you show your child that $100K bill from Netlify? 😬
I certainly wouldn't wanna traumatize my child like that.
Nice ad
Thanks for saving our time and nerves :)
Just don’t do serverless that’s it
Viewer beware: This is a gripe video with simple solutions for any reasonably talented developer.