Supabase

Raised as a usability problem by 25 people on Hacker News over 5 years (2022–2026), in 13 threads.

People raised many different problems with Supabase, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 27 complaints

Self-hosted Supabase requires an overwhelming number of .env configs, making setup hard2025-12-04
Lacking detailed docs makes production self-hosting hard to figure out2025-04-23
Missing docs for core user table and client library joins wasted weeks2025-04-23
Missing polish and attention to detail forces users to file issues and ask others for workarounds2025-04-22
RLS permission schemes become very hard to maintain and test as complexity grows2025-04-22
Users table columns undocumented and behave unexpectedly, such as validation flags set on creation2024-10-27
Has to log into the web dashboard each time to manage the database2024-08-19
Local Supabase differs from remote, so file uploads fail locally and database can't be reset for migrations2024-04-15
Must click each query individually to see index recommendations, so scanning all queries at once is impractical2024-04-15
Self-hosting Postgres was painful and the documentation was very lacking2024-04-15
Huge docker-compose with barely any documentation, hard to disable unneeded services2024-04-15
Easy to write a RLS config that looks valid but silently doesn't work; must test2024-04-15
Tables created via SQL are not private by default, a footgun for users2024-01-10
Core auth function docs lack return values, error conditions and parameter details2023-08-10
Local setup is hard; command names and migration files are confusing and poorly documented2023-08-10
Changing an id field from int8 to uuid gets stuck and needs manual hacking2023-05-20
CLI assumes cloud remote; self-hosted remote discovered only halfway through a POC2023-05-20
Easy to edit production database by accident; no read-only default or warning2023-05-19
Easy to create permissive rules by default and hard to keep an overview2023-04-13
Hard to figure out how to build the OAuth auth flow in React Native2023-04-13
Hidden shortcut needs a Cmd key that the user's keyboard lacks, so the feature can't be reached2023-02-07
Dashboard is slow and doesn't render correctly on some laptops2022-05-10
Signing up silently subscribes people to marketing emails without consent2022-05-10
Developers waste hours in confusion; SDK, docs and UI are half-baked2022-05-10
Setup steps are undocumented, so Twitter auth and realtime silently fail until hidden settings are found2022-05-10
Couldn't get an answer to a CORS error question on Discord, making the product impossible to use2022-03-23
Some features are so hard to find, wasting a lot of time2022-03-22