Supabase Teardown: How Their Pricing & Onboarding Drive Growth (Part 2)

Hey everybody, welcome back to another special edition of Monetizing SaaS. This is part 2 of our Supabase teardown. Today we are diving deep into their purchasing experience, everything from onboarding to expansion. In part 1, when we looked at Supabase's pricing page, one thing that was so obvious was that Supabase operates with a very clear belief, and that's that pricing and billing are not just operational considerations, they are literally a part of the product. And that's what we're here today to explore, how they've delivered against that belief. With me as always are Schematic co-founders Ben, Jazz, and Geo. I'm going to share my screen. We're going to walk through the onboarding experience, the customer portal, how I might expand with the product. You know, Ben, Jazz, and Geo are going to layer in their thoughts on what they think Supabase is doing really well, as well as where there may be opportunities for improvement. So let's get started. So let's get started and let's kind of, you know, you guys weigh in wherever you want to. I'll drive, but stop and interrupt me if you've got questions or observations. I think kind of initially, You know, we're going to go start a project here. And so I think we need to kind of come in through GitHub. Incorrect name. One second. Why is that not working?

Might need to reset your pass.

I wonder why that's happening.

It's a real user scenario. It's all good.

Okay. This is an incognito. Signing in.

Okay. We're in.

User error, maybe. All right. So you're being redirected to the authorized application if your browser doesn't redirect you back. Okay. It looks like we're being directed here. It is, it is a little slow. Who knows if that's my internet or not.

Yeah, pretty slow when I did it too.

Yeah, it's interesting.

I think they have provisioning takes a minute for this product, and you'll see in the first state that they try to give you something to do while waiting, although we're waiting for that state, right?

If we're going through sort of the activation and onboarding experience, sort of interesting, there's like several choices that were made here that was, that's, that's sort of maybe notable. One is like obviously the social proof. Like, that's pretty interesting, the way they actually use social proof. It's not, it's very oriented towards builders. It's very oriented towards like an individual user, maybe an indie hacker, things like that. And that's super interesting. Obviously, the choice of auth is interesting. There's a couple other things that I'll point out that are just like, you know, sort of just, it's good to point out just because like there's so many choices you make in this screen. Right. The 3 other ones that are sort of like top of mind for me is the persistence of documentation in the top right is interesting. That is a, it's part of the funnel, right? Clearly for Supabase, Supabase. And then 2 other things. One, auto-opt into marketing is a choice and that's like a hard choice often. People just tend to do it, but they've clearly done it here where like you just, you're going to get marketing emails. If you sign up for this. And then the third is the choice of 2FA. It is an email 2FA, and it isn't mobile, it isn't AuthKey, it is email, which probably speaks to their user base and speaks to the type of user sort of signing up here. But all of that is interesting, and they're all sort of different choices that were made in this flow, and I wonder if they were distinct choices that were made based off of conversion rate. But I'd point those out because I think they're, they're just, they're important, I think, to consider as you kind of build these types of experiences.

Yeah, I think those are great observations. I wonder too if this quote rotates. You want to check it out?

Yep.

Nice. And they require 2FA, which is, you know, that doesn't help conversion, but it kind of doesn't.

If you may have to do it, we may have to do it, but it, but it, I think they probably do it because of probably how much fraud they get and how much sort of like, and how expensive spinning up infrastructure is. Like you probably want to make sure it's just a real person.

Yeah, I wonder if, um, if you click documentation, do you think this opens in a new tab or do you think it takes you to a new—

definitely a new tab.

Let's check it out. Yeah, they thought about that. Okay. Yep, good observation. So once we've signed in for the first time, looks like they're going to have us walk through creating a new organization. I'm going to call this Startup. We're on the free plan, so here's our first interaction with pricing and plans.

Where does the pricing detail thing though, the little—

we can, we can choose between 3 plans, and then if we click here, it opens up the pricing page. I don't know if this is— this is what it opens to. And then if we go back here, yeah, we need to pick a plan. So why don't we start with zero free? We'll call this schematic teardown vision. Any thought, any kind of observations here? I think it's kind of interesting just I like the experience of, hey, select your 3 plans, they're very simple. If you need to kind of look at them again, you can.

Uh, yeah, I mean, I think the only other thing to kind of point out here, right, is that like very clearly this is optimized for the builder, it's very optimized for the user. I mean, it's probably needless to say, but the user is the buyer here, probably. Um, and so clearly this whole onboarding flow is— has a lot of assumptions baked in.

Yeah, it's very focused on just the hobbyist sector, not to say that's the entirety of their business, but you have to make a lot of choices on whether you want to optimize for that user or not. Yeah.

All right. We've, we're, we're in here. We're getting in here. We've created the project. While you wait, and Jazz, to your point, browse soup-based documentation, clearly a big important part of their funnel. To the point you made, like if they're, if you're running into kind of things going too slow or not refreshing, they're kind of addressing it here. So they know that.

And then in the top right, you can see it's setting up a project.

Yeah.

It's trying to give you a few things to do in the few minutes it takes to provision the database.

Yeah.

Um, but then there it is. It's done.

There it is. So get started by building out your database, explore other products. This is interesting, right? Like this is where you're going to go start. Like this is probably the reason you've come, but immediately they're introducing you to a multi-product offering. What do you make of that? I mean, that's kind of interesting, especially if like the choice here is often for the hobbyist.

Yeah, it's good. It's, it's interesting to point that out. I don't know. I mean, I don't make a ton out of it yet. I think like the primary use case is the database piece. And then I think you probably, they're probably just hinting towards like the ecosystem here, um, in a way that gets people thinking about building a complete app. The thing is like people are just so, they have such brand awareness and market awareness that like, I don't think people are you know, don't know they have those things. But, but it definitely is like probably a streamlined usability thing.

Yeah.

And I think you're probably right. One thing though, I mean, there are not many products that I walk into where it's like on page 1, hey, here are all of our other product offerings and you can explore it with so much transparency. I think it's quite, I mean, it's just exceptional kind of embedded product marketing in my point of view.

Yeah, it can be tricky, I think, for companies like this where there's like a common happy path, but maybe it's not. 90%, maybe it's 75%, something like this, you know? So you're trying to strike a balance between like your most common new user is gonna see big bold text telling them what to do, but then you have a long tail of people that wanna hit auth first, maybe, you know, like if you're making a new app, a lot of people, the first thing they'll do is they're gonna design out their domain model, i.e., their database. But then, um, if you're coming at it from like, I built a React app and there's no backend for it at all yet, maybe you would do auth first. I'm not sure.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

I think with these types of products, just like when you're multi-product like this, like, you know, Cloudflare has this problem, other sort of like Datadog has this problem, et cetera. It's like, it just like from a UX perspective just gets really overloaded. And I'm interested in what Gio would think on this. Um, but like, it's really hard to kind of create a compelling experience. It's really straightforward here that, that makes sense. And so I think what they're probably trying to do on this page is hit the most common products, hit the most common use cases and make sure there's a there's like a really simple happy path to get there. Like if we went into the sidebar there, probably a little overwhelming, but like they do have like sort of their products there and sort of like a section, but becomes harder to kind of navigate. You know, I wonder if this is just something that they've tested and said, okay, this gets people to penetrate into the other products a bit faster.

Yeah.

You know, I think, gee, I would love your perspective on that. Like recently, I, in kind of my own personal account, I was building an app and I used Supabase for the database and I had not known that Supabase I could use for auth. So I had already kind of gone ahead and set up Clerk for auth. You know, and I wonder, had I like come into Supabase first without having known of Clerk, would I have just kind of used Supabase's auth? I mean, it's kind of interesting sort of to lay out this offering, especially if the hobbyist doesn't know that they've also got auth. I don't know, like the other thing I'll just say about the design for me personally is that I like the, just the straightforwardness here. Hey, we're multi-product. Here are our other products if you want to explore them. And here's easy ways to explore them. I kind of like that merchandising.

Yeah. What I would add is design. Like there's like, there's always design philosophies you hear out there that are trying to be one size fits all, like have one single path, one single place to go on every page. And that's, those are Good rules of thumb, but what's clear about this persona is it's an engineer. They're going to read. They're going to expect a lot of— they signed up because Supabase is multi-product, so they want to see that they made the right choice and confirm that it truly is multi-product. And then what you'll notice throughout this UI is just how dense it is. The buttons are tiny. Like when I was first learning about design, that was a no-no. That button is tiny and it's also not a separate color than the background. Which in the past, that was not okay. But when you're talking to, when you're designing for more technical users, you absolutely can do all of this. Density is fine. Complexity is more tolerable. And what you're seeing here is, okay, get started with your building, building your database, couple calls to action there. But then it's also, here's everything else we do. And it's a laundry list and there's a lot, but we know you can handle it. In fact, that might create more trust. Than just stripping away everything to one message.

That we know you can handle it idea is a really cool idea from a design perspective, because you're right, it is a laundry list. It is dense. It is sort of like, there's no flair to it. I think about this also just as a little bit of a segue in the context of like investor updates. Like, should you just send like a simple Google Doc, fully bulleted, very straightforward, very simple, no flair? Or should you design a deck that kind of gives some energy behind it? And something I really like about this is that idea that, look, we know you can handle something that's very straightforward and it's like very matter of fact.

One of the things to kind of like think about here is like, I'm sort of curious about, I'm not actually sure, is like, what are the onboarding ramps for Supabase, right? Like, and like to your point on engineers and like who the, who this sort of target is, the question that I sort of think about is like, which type of engineer, right? Is it, is it someone learning to code? That like that is like sort of like the highest magnitude that they're getting here, right, that they're trying to activate? Are they optimizing for someone that already like understand, like it sort of has a project, they're sort of in, you know, their software engineer is a career, that type of thing? Because clearly, Fynn, you came in here kind of on that, on the lower end of that, right? Um, you're trying to build an app maybe for the first time, that type of thing, and sort of hit this experience and really kind of it resonated with you. Um, so that's one sort of bucket that I sort of think about. The other thing that I sort of think about is like, how are people actually deploying Supabase? Is it by signing up for an account, thinking about it as a core part of their, their project, or are they firing up a template from Vercel and then deploying Supabase from there, uh, and going through like a very tailored sort of like instruction set from, from that sort of path? Um, then this matters less, right? Um, and so I'm sort of curious, like which, like, what paths they see and which ones are the most common, because we may be looking at maybe the least common onboarding path, frankly. And I, you know, but it's hard to kind of verify that.

That is such a good point. I wonder that too. Maybe Ben can think about it with us for a second. But like, I wonder if this is actually, let's take me as the user, right? I suspect we are moving into a world where there are just going to be millions of me, which are kind of less technical people who can now go build applications with AI. They're using tools like Cursor, and Supabase is really kind of comes up quickly, even for somebody like me, because when you start, when you start building your app in Cursor or whatever AI tool you're using, like you need the database and then Supabase is like, you know, somehow you find it first. I don't, I can't remember how I found it first. Maybe I just knew about it. But then when you get into the project, like Supabase makes it exceptionally easy to go create a database model for somebody who's never done it before. Like I was blown away by just like I was done in seconds. You know, it's kind of exceptional. So I wonder if there are like millions of people like me and if it's a very common happy path. And you know, this is one of the reasons why from an inflection or tailwind perspective, Supabase is so well positioned.

Yeah, I do wonder. I think when I look at this, I don't think like, you know, this is targeted at somebody that doesn't know how to code or has never done anything, right? Like by marketing towards hobbyists, like you're obviously selecting for like a lower level of experience or you know, maybe like knowledge in general, but like, uh, and this probably does take off like a lot of the harder edges of just like little minor things. You know, a lot of being an experienced software engineer is just like learning tons of trivia of things to not do or to do. And so like the less of those things you have to know, the easier it is for like a hobbyist or an inexperienced person. If this was targeted really at like the kind of, uh, persona that some people might think is kind of collapsing through AI of like a product manager slash developer or something like this. Like I would think you would either see like more like educational oriented content here. Like what should you actually do like to make an app? Or like it would, it would have the little like, you know, magic icon that every AI app has and it would be asking you to like prompt. You know, so like it's in an interesting kind of middle ground where like there is some amount of competence assumed here and some amount of like you are working as an engineer here, not like a, you know, like a prompter or whatever.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's good. This is a good thread. Let's start to look more at billing experience and how they've woven that into product. And I think what's obviously notable or kind of visible is this, so they're kind of letting you know your plan even here in the homepage. You know, it's not, it's not so separated.

And it's also implying that you can have a different plan per organization.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Which is compliant. And it's often if you clicked on it, like it might give you sort of like another kind of opportunity to kind of consider the plan that you're on, but it doesn't look like that. It's more about organization. So where should we go here?

I think probably Project Settings.

Project Settings.

Bottom left.

And here we see Billing. So we see Subscription and we see Usage. So let's look at Subscription first. So, hey Gio, here's their first color.

Yeah, that's their brand color.

Yeah, all caps, green, free. We are on the free plan.

What happens when you hit Change Subscription Plan is that, all right, they have this pullout, lots of context here.

I think this is a—

That lime green on gray is, again, not a best practices move, but something I think you can absolutely get away with.

Yeah, the contrast on Enterprise there is like, uh, interesting. They're an interesting choice for kind of, um, accessibility.

Yeah, yeah, Enterprise is kind of below the fold. You don't notice it immediately. Okay, I, I like— I mean, I think this is nice, right? It's like change subscription plan. Oh, here it is. It's really easy to make a decision. It's really easy to evaluate the options. Anything else you guys like about this?

See what's next is it's just going to— you don't have a credit card. So this is a great screen too. It's a lot of detail on what's going to happen, setting expectations. Can you expand the excess compute? Yeah, excess. That's funny.

Excess.

And then a little bit more on compute. There's a lot of— I mean, we talked about this in the part 1, like their whole philosophy is transparent, predictable pricing, and they're going to great lengths here to make sure you're not going to get surprised.

Also, they're also going to great lengths to tell you how much value they're giving you, right? They're giving you $10. Yeah, fair. Which is kind of like— it's— that's kind of a fun choice. But, uh, and, uh, that makes me sort of feel like, oh, they're giving me actual value rather than if they just said you get this many hours.

That might be— is that because you— no, that, that can't be proration on the free plan because it's a free plan. That's just like a free—

yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like, for instance, like, I think if you go through this flow with a different product like Render, Render will say like you get this much compute for free. I think that hits me differently than $10. You get $10.

Yeah, so it is a fun choice. They're, you know, they're kind of weaving in how billing works everywhere. It's, you know, kind of a part of their docs. And, you know, as we recall from episode 1, they've also got that entire blog article dedicated to how they think about pricing and the fact that, like, pricing is effectively always in beta for them. Like, it's always evolving. Okay, what should we do now? What do you want to do now?

It might— Fynn, if you have an existing account, the usage tab is going to be a lot more useful there than it is here.

It's—

I think we've covered the activation, although there's a couple things I'm in this screen that are interesting. So if you scroll, there's that cost control feature if you scroll down.

Yeah.

Where you're able to set a spend cap. Click that. Yeah. And they visually explain the types of what, like the difference between a spend cap and having it off, which I think is clever. The toggle is actually the image, which again is like subtle UX, but probably fine for this user. But this is like, this is so luxury to me. This is you rarely see such thoughtful, you know, limit management and probably makes sense for infrastructure.

Yeah.

About spend cap that kind of sends you off to their docs. Okay. So we've kind of looked at subscription plan. We've looked at cost control. Then they've got the billing breakdown. Again, back to predictability, transparency. They're just like making this extremely clear to see. Um, credit balance, payment methods, who's receiving the invoices and the bills, what the billing address is, tax ID. It is luxurious. It's a good word for it.

It's also similar to Vercel. It's like they're threading the needle on, okay, hobbyists, you can get going and you don't really need to worry about anything here. Just start. Also, if you grow up and you have like almost enterprise level needs, that's here too. Like there's a, there's obviously the tax stuff, the billing user stuff. There's a legal documents. What is, what even is that? What's the legal?

I imagine this is, okay, so this is their DPA. This is their SOC 2.

Don't talk to us.

Yeah, it's interesting. These are their upgrade buttons here.

Yep, yep. Yeah, it's like if you want our security questionnaire, you got to pay for it. Um, I think that makes sense.

Yeah, but yeah, sorry, go ahead.

I was just saying, yeah, we've thought about this for Schematic where like if you're gonna kind of ask us to do a pen test or look for our standard security questionnaire, like you really shouldn't be in our entry-level plan.

Right.

But it's still self-service. So you can go to like relative, like I would probably venture to say that the majority of SaaS companies for questions like this, you're either going through email support or talking to someone.

Definitely.

And they've found a way to make this self-service, which is.

Yeah, I've actually never seen this self-service. Well, I've seen it in like trust centers, but like never as a conversion moment, which is kind of interesting.

Yeah.

I think I like it. I mean, like, it's definitely like, I think it's, I think again, it's kind of optimized for the persona, right? Like the persona that's like the developer here that might be converting on their own. It might be at an organization, might be like, all right, I know I need to get some of this stuff, but I still don't want to talk to anybody for it.

Yeah.

Yeah. And that's the philosophy to believe in and orient your whole product around, frankly.

I mean, Yeah, that's cool.

No one wants to talk to you on the phone.

But so what we kind of like just categorize this as, this legal doc tab is basically, it is a way to communicate transparently how they have approached security and legal, but it is also a conversion rate opportunity for their business that is designed to be really self-serve and really low friction for maybe a hobbyist developer who's now working in an org, a real company that needs this type of security in place to actually adopt the product internally?

It's a good question. What is it? I don't know if it's trust building. A lot of this stuff is compliance, right? It's more about I've got to tick a box. That's sort of my opinion on this. For some people it might be trust building for sure, but like it's more, it's more of a, okay, this is my compliance center that I can get to self-service and I can, um, address questions I'm getting from my CIO, like really quickly about using Supabase. And like, I'm not going to have to like go through hoops for it. You know what I mean? But the conversion moment piece is unique for sure.

I think where it is trust building is my sense is a product like this and Vercel, they crush it downmarket. They have like the hobbyist path really well paved. But maybe where some of their danger is, is like, do people feel like they can grow up with these tools? And not even just scalability, but pricing. And like, if a product like Supabase or Vercel has a great reputation among early stage builders, that might make you think, well, like, whoa, can it handle my enterprise needs? And that, that may be where people drop off because they don't feel like, you know, there's some companies where they, they need to talk to someone in order to sign a bigger contract. And so there's some trust building here, like, hey, we can handle more growth stage and up compliance needs and stuff.

It's a really good point on like, they've locked up probably the hobbyist market. Like they brought that, like that motion is like probably super, super good. Definitely is super, super good. Um, and then the question is, how do I go upmarket or how do I sell upmarket in a way that's like a, like low CAC, really low friction. A, um, and, and B, that like is appropriate, right? Um, yeah. And it's credible. Um, I wonder like, I mean, the questions I have on this page are basically like, how often do people click on it? How often is it like truly self-service? You know what I mean? Um, and how often are they just like having to get on the phone anyway? You know?

Yeah. Even if it does lead to a phone call, it's working in my— I would say Our— the purchasing experience lives in this, this page for sure, because there's an upgrade button, the billing page, and probably the usage tab there.

Yeah.

Um, see, there's a link to plans here. There's limits.

I'm building Word.

That reflects what you bought.

Yeah.

There's an upgrade button. So I would say those 3 tabs make up the purchasing experience for this product. Although, you know, it's everywhere. Like you said, you noticed it in the organization selector that there was a plan pills.

Yeah, I mean, look, I mean, billing is literally everywhere here, or pricing, or kind of plan management is everywhere. Okay, here my invoices.

Try going to integrations. Are there any upsells there?

Yeah, let's see. Install or sell. Add new project. Doesn't look like any upsells here.

Yeah.

It's super interesting. I mean, like there's either a recognition that there's so many paths to upsell or just they're, they're still trying to decide what the happy path is.

For the upsell.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It makes sense to not limit integrations because that's just integrations just speed up getting to the point where you're relying on the product.

Yeah, that's right. I can invite teammates here. It doesn't look like. They're going to charge me for seats. Let's make sure that they're like, do they have seats at all?

I think they don't.

Yeah. It's all by instance, right?

It's all by organization. I don't know if that means just one database. I think it does. It's just like these base plans and then a lot of usage-based. So it's overage model. You get X included usage and then Y per unit. Beyond that.

Yep, yep. Okay, um, so general, they do have a—

if you scroll down there, interestingly, they have a churn flow.

Yeah, so let's delete organization.

Well, actually, yeah, I don't know if it's— the only way to know if it's a true churn flow is if you're on a paid plan, what happens.

That's right, that's right.

Probably it does take you off the paid plan.

Yeah. Okay, um, do we want to look anywhere else into like kind of overall purchasing experience or experience. What we could do is we could try to like expand on the product and see what happens.

We could do that. I was sort of thinking about the post-purchase experience.

However, that'd be a bit tough. Maybe we can get like a test credit card from Supabase at some point and then do the post-purchase experience.

Yeah.

Well, it's not that much money, but I would, you know, upgrade your actual project account, not this one.

This one's doing good.

Let's just see what happens here. So if I want to upgrade. No save. I'll add a payment method here.

Oh, this is a Stripe form.

Okay.

Actually, yeah.

Stripe Element. Stripe Element. Yeah. Yeah.

I haven't seen this Link UX.

I really truly do not like Link.

Um, so what is Link?

Because I think like it does a lot of like, this is probably an aside, but I feel like it's like, it makes a lot of assumptions about what you want. And like, I certainly don't want my credit card stored automatically, but it just does it. Unless I opt out, you know?

Yeah. Shopify has a similar product. I feel like, yeah, I feel like it's probably doing exactly what it's designed to do, which is just massively.

Um, yeah, but it like opts you into like, oh, like you can charge me again where it's like, I don't really want it.

Smart by, it's very smart by Stripe because like. Then you have one credit card in there and you can pay for anything that runs on Stripe without ever having to enter it again.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to, I'm going to have my internet break right now, by the way.

Okay.

Yeah, it's an interesting experience.

I mean, like, when I think about this experience, it's sort of interesting.

It's like, this is the type of product that shows like, it's like Vercel, it's like other sort of large products where it's like, you just have so many user types, you know? And so like the reasons you would upgrade, the reasons you would convert are just like, numerous, you know? Yeah. And it's definitely a hard experience to build. Like, do you just say, all right, let's just like capture all of those types of moments, right? It's the moment where I'm an enterprise company, I need a SOC 2 report. It's the moment I exceed compute. It's the moment I exceed storage. It's the moment I have another project, you know what I mean? Or do you say like, I'm optimized for one of those, you know, and just do it really well?

I think that these multi-product companies accept that there's not one path. And it's, yes, it's a harder, it's harder in general to market, to design for. But, you know, PostHog is another one. Maybe we'll do a teardown of them, but they are not afraid of being multi-product, both in terms of how they market and their UX. And that's clear with Supabase too. And it comes back to the persona thing. Like, yes, there's different personas, but all of them are demanding. All of them want to do self-service. All of them want the product to do a lot.

Yep.

Actually, if you strip it down to just like, hey, this is the one thing you care about, the one flow, the one thing we're positioning around, that might hurt you.

That might. What's interesting, the screen is sort of like maybe, maybe related to that question.

Yeah. So this is the screen that popped. So I had stopped sharing screen to put the credit card in. The credit card is now in. And this is the screen that you get to.

That's cool.

Um, so current time limits weren't enough. I want better customer support. I'm migrating from a previous project, I need more compute.

You know, it's so funny. There's two things that are funny about this. One, it's the exact conversation we're just having, which is like, the second is like, I've seen this, you know, when I was building at Syngrid, uh, there was a churn survey just like this. There was a churn flow just like this. And I think that that's where I've seen this type of flow. I've not seen it on conversion, which is kind of interesting, which is actually like a moment where you probably get way more answers. Than you do on ChatGPT.

And you learn so much more about your customer base. I mean, like, this type of information is gold, right?

Yeah.

Um, let's, let's skip this. So here we are. We are now officially in the Pro plan. We're no longer on free. Um, looks like we have been invoiced as of today. We've paid. They're going to get $25 from us. Good for them.

Um.

So what happens now? I mean, I wonder, I'm going to stop sharing for a second. I haven't seen like any kind of additional notification in the app. I wonder if that's—

I think you have to connect your, like connect your application to the database and actually start using everything.

I did just receive an email. So I did just receive this email. Let me share. Here's the email I received. And guess what? They're using Orb. They're not using Stripe.

Nice Orb touch there, a little viral moment.

Yep, powered by Orb. Um, got the invoice. If I view the invoice, share this tab instead. Um, I am at invoices with orb.com.

Oh, so Orb provisioned this invoice.

Yeah, Orb sent the invoice.

That means, well, what does it mean? Does that payment, that payment form was still Stripe. Okay.

I think they, I think they still use Stripe as a payment processor.

I wonder how much of that purchasing experience was Orb powered or is just Orb in the background provisioning an invoice and that's purely—

Orb didn't show up until this moment. It was emailed, right? Right here. This is when we first noticed Orb.

It could have, it could have been elsewhere. Like it could have been powering, you know, usage numbers. In the dashboard and stuff.

Let's go into the billing again. Let's look at our payment methods. Delete the card, see what happens. Oh, I can't delete the card. Um, you want to try to downgrade here or cancel?

It goes downgrade.

Let's downgrade to free. Confirm.

Actually, before you do this, can you try deleting the org?

What does that do?

If you go back to General, General, and just see what, what this does.

Please type this to confirm.

Well, I wouldn't do it now. I'm just curious if it impacts your— how it impacts billing.

Yeah. Yeah. So do you want me to try that?

It's your question. Like, is it— does it prorate or something like that?

Does it—

does it—

does it actually downgrade you to free? Does it cancel your subscription? Or do your subscription keep running and you can create an org? I think it's probably the latter because I've seen in their docs like stuff about you can transfer credits between orgs. Somehow the subscription is not attached to the org exactly. It's attached to the account. Maybe I— that's a little bit unclear actually. That's my instinct here.

Yeah. Um, I'm sure their docs answer it, so we could probably go answer it. I want to see what happens if we downgrade. We downgrade to free. We'll lead to reductions in your organization's quota. Projects will be paused after a week of inactivity. Okay, let's do it. Okay, here we go.

Turn survey.

Yep.

Turn survey.

Um, so here are all the different reasons for if it's kind of hard to see pricing. My project. So look, they're trying to constantly learn about how their pricing is perceived, uh, just as they would try to learn how their product is perceived. My project isn't getting traction. Poor customer service. Missing feature. I didn't see the value. Supabase didn't meet my needs. Dashboard's too complicated. That's interesting. We talked about that. Postgres is too complicated. Problem not solved. Too many bugs or issues. I decided to use something else. My work is finished or discontinued. I'm migrating to start a new project. None of the above.

Yep.

Confirm downgrade. Oh, you got—

you have to select.

Okay, let's see here. Uh, none of the above. Confirm downgrade.

What was I doing this the other day?

And I was like, I changed my answer so it was valid.

All right, back on the free plan.

Nice.

I can't remember. I remember it was like a retail sort of like churn survey where they're like, or return, it was Amazon.

I was like, I was returning something and it was like, why are you returning it? And I was like, you know, I used it and it didn't fit. And then it was like, that's not a valid return. And then I did, I redid the survey and I was like, I didn't use it because I didn't need it anymore. And they're like, all right, that's valid. But all right.

Well, so we walked through onboarding today. We walked through in-app billing experience. We walked through upgrade. We walked through downgrade. We hit a lot. I think I'll restate one thing, and that's like, what is evident is the billing experience, the purchasing experience. It is extremely considered. It is sort of ubiquitous throughout their application. They view billing as product. They view pricing as product. Let's, let's grade what we, we just kind of went through from an experience perspective. Scale of 1 to 5, how would you guys grade Supabase from onboarding through expansion through downgrade?

It's interesting. I mean, I kind of, I separate these into onboarding, activation, conversion, basically.

Those are kind of the moments. I'd say onboarding-wise, I think they, they're very, I think they understand who their user is relatively clearly in terms of like who's onboarding and the type of user that's kind of onboarding. Activation-wise, it feels relatively clear too, right? That it's sort of optimized for a happy path and that happy path is setting up a database and then adding on their sort of multi-product ecosystem so that they can sort of get their talent into an application.

I, you know, I think you mentioned that they've well considered their billing experience.

I don't know if I would agree with that. I think like when you get to the billing page, it has to do a lot because I think there are just a lot of paths. And I think to Gio's point, like maybe that's okay. And like that's sort of, you're sort of accepting the complexity, but you can see it in their churn survey. You can see it in their conversion survey. I think they're just still trying to learn a lot about the best experience there. Uh, because frankly, I think when you go through it, there are just so many paths you can take. Um, so I don't know, I, I don't know if I'd give it as high of a grade as I would when you think about their pricing page, right? Which is converting, right? Uh, and a converting page as well. Um, that is extremely considered. When you get to the actual conversion moment, I think it, it sort of leaves something to be desired for me, right? Because of how many paths there are. Um, I think there's a lot of cool things they've done that I haven't seen before, but it just feels like it could be a lot better. And I think we'd have to spend more time on it to figure out what those things are. Right? But my gut is when I look at it, that it, it's just kind of going in lots of different directions.

Cool. Okay. So you want to give them, you want to throw a number, give them a 1 to 5?

Um, I mean, clearly, obviously they, it converts. So I don't know how much opportunity it's like actually leaving on the table. I don't know, a high 3, like a 3.9 or something. It's, it's certainly not the best I've ever seen. Uh, part of that is just because of how complex this product is.

Gio, what do you think?

Yeah, I'll take a different perspective on it. I think lots of paths for this type of product and this type of user, lots of paths and complexity and density is okay. In fact, probably the right thing. If you were to ask me, how do I, what would it look like to get that experience to something really, really simple and distilled into one path? I think you just lose a lot of conversion opportunities then. It's a multi-product tool with lots of users. They embrace that. So they open all the paths. I'm not sure, maybe like aesthetically it'd be cleaner to be simpler, I don't think that trade-off is good for them. So I would give it a high mark. I would give it, I don't know, 4 or 5, just because it's hard to give a 5. I'm sure there's some places you can improve, but yeah, they're trying to do a lot for a lot of users. I think they, they do a good job with it. There's a lot of thoughtfulness. And like, I think the thing I was most impressed with is, as we know, they lock up the hobbyist path and they've put a lot of thought into how do we show companies that are growing that need more enterprise-type things that we're there for them and we can support them too. And I think that's probably their biggest risk. If they think about their growth, they can't stay downmarket forever. They have to prove to themselves and their shareholders and investors that they can go upmarket. And that's very difficult to do. So it's cool to see them do that in kind of a thoughtful, maybe even innovative way.

Nice. I'm learning through this process that I'm probably like the easiest teacher of all of us. Like if I were a teacher, I'd always be giving the A's. I'm going to give them a 5. I'm going to give them a 5 because I think they do a few things that are very high leverage exceptionally. The first thing that I think that they do that is high leverage is just incredibly clear multi-product product marketing. I think it's hard to do, and I think they do it kind of exceptionally. I think the second thing that they do that's also high leverage is they incorporate pricing into the product in a way that's beautiful and native and extremely low friction for users. And I think that that's way easier said than done. Like, most companies suck at that, and they do not suck at that. And then I think thirdly, like, they are just so considered and thoughtful around all the potential paths to expand on the product. And my bet is that it makes it really easy for them to expand their customer base as hobbyists become bigger companies or as big as startups, like, start to graduate into enterprise. I'm going to throw a 5. Y'all, I think this has been one of the most interesting ones we've done. This wraps part 2 of the Supabase teardown. So much stands out, but I think what stands out to me most in this walkthrough is just how intentional that they've been around making pricing and billing so integral to the product experience. Thanks as always to Ben, Jaz, Geo for sharing their insights, their observations. Thanks to everybody for listening. I mean, if you haven't already, check out part 1 of this teardown where we looked very deeply at their pricing page. We'll see you next week with another teardown of some of the best developer tools and how they approach pricing and billing and all things monetization. Thanks for listening.