Supabase Teardown: Pricing, Onboarding & Billing Breakdown (Part 1)

Hey everybody, welcome back to another special edition of Monetizing SaaS. This week we're going to do a teardown on Supabase, which is, you know, as everybody knows, a standout in the open source developer tool space. We're going to dive into their pricing page. What's great about it? What are opportunities? We're going to drive into their onboarding experience and their billing and purchasing experience and look for things that they do really well as, as, and as always look for opportunities for things that they might even be able to do better. With me as always, Schematic co-founders Ben, Geo, Jazz. Excited to take it away. Gio, can you share your screen and pull up Supabase's pricing page?

Yes.

All right, so Supabase is one of the most talked about tools in the developer ecosystem today. It's pitched as an open source Firebase alternative, um, but built on, on Postgres. It's a backend as a service, doing a ton of things right, real-time capabilities, authentication, um, a lot of people really love serverless functions, even file storage. At its core, it's all about enabling developers to go build applications super quickly. I'd like to kind of kick off with Ben. Ben, have you used Supabase and how do you kind of think about Supabase's value?

Personally, I've never used Supabase. I think I'm not quite in the developer persona that usually buys Supabase. I think with them, you're definitely having to be very bought into their perspective on just this idea of a backend as a service, which is kind of a different thing than like a database as a service or a PaaS. So it kind of is fairly prescriptive on what your architecture is going to be. I think it has a lot of appeal for frontend developers, Next.js developers, folks that are kind of like not too hung up on maintaining the typical multi-tier app with a database backend frontend. So I haven't used it. I think generally the pitch is like, this is going to be pretty simple to get up and running on. You can focus on the business logic of your application. You can focus on the UI of your application, but not really worry about, uh, data persistence and, um, yeah, things like auth you mentioned.

Yeah, cool. All right, well, let's, let's talk about the pricing page here for a second. So maybe kind of a kickoff question here is how does Supabase price? I mean, they're clearly using tiered pricing. They're clearly kind of offering a very generous free tier to appeal to startups and hobbyists, um, and then they're scaling from there with, you know, a pro plan and an enterprise plan. Jazz, when you look at the pricing page, kind of how would you articulate the company's approach?

It's a good question. I mean, I think if you go to the top, it's, um, I mean, it's— there's a lot of this that's relatively straightforward, right? I mean, they are optimizing for developers, they're optimizing for hobbyists, uh, clearly a very, very generous free tier to get started. And then very frankly, a very generous pro tier, right? I think there's like a very, a very distinct switch between pro and team that get you into more advanced features that you typically see in enterprise tier, like SOC 2, SSO. They actually have HIPAA available in the team plan as well. And then enterprise obviously gets into more support and things like that. And so in lots of ways, it's like honestly pretty predictable in terms of how they've set this up, right? I think though, sort of, and, and, you know, we kind of talked about reasons they win, right? They, they win on, you know, people that, that want to optimize for SQL, they want open source, right? Uh, there is the tailwinds of Next.js and React. In many ways, there's a lot of kind of similarities between like the evolution to a need for Supabase that's similar to kind of like Vercel, right? But, um, I think the interesting thing that I kind of sort of came to as I was sort of reviewing this and thinking about this is If you kind of go down, you'll see some sort of distinct choices they've made, right? So like if you look at compute, right, they price per instance size, right? Not utilization. And if you go to other sort of price metrics, there's some utilization metrics that are priced. A lot of them are oriented around size or of the instance or capacity or something like that. And this is sort of interesting too, right? This idea of cost control. And that's sort of, that's available in the Pro plan, which is basically their $25 tier, right? So one thing that sort of like sort of strikes you as you kind of go through this is they really optimize towards basically predictable pricing. And it reminds me of, and so I sort of came to that conclusion, interestingly, before clicking on a couple of things. One, if you go up and click on, I wanna, so go and do that real quick. You'll see the first line of this page is predictable billing. If you go back and then you go to the bottom of the page and then you go to, are you gonna change pricing in the future? And then you click on that blog post from 2021. So it's 3, 4 years ago, right? This whole thing is about predictable pricing. And so there's this sort of interesting thread that goes through this pricing page, which is really oriented around predictability. And it reminds me a lot of if you've ever kind of studied Snowflake and their go-to-market, one of the things they did that was so compelling, right? It was so compelling at the time when they were going to market is they separated storage and compute., and that was sort of a novel thing for, um, those types of services. It actually counterpositioned them against traditional providers, right? So if you thought about Redshift and you looked at Snowflake, certainly there were differences in feature sets, right? Um, but the fact that storage and compute were separated from a cost perspective actually made them more appropriate for certain contexts, right? Um, similarly, what they've done here is They've done two things. One, they've, they've basically counter-positioned against Firebase and they've counter-positioned against AWS Amplify and other providers that typically, they typically price on compute and utilization, right? And they basically said, look, we want this to be predictable. We want this to be something that like you use and you're not scared of a $30,000 bill. And so not only are we going to price this based off of instance size and things like that, We're going to give you basically out of the gate, almost at the free level, cost control.

Right.

And so that, that's super interesting. And then the other thing that's sort of that, that is really apparent as you go through this is they started from identity perspective as a Firebase alternative, right? SQL versus NoSQL, right? Is sort of one, one big difference between the two, a Google ecosystem versus a different ecosystem.

Right.

Enterprise customers versus SMB, right? And so they've counterpositioned a lot on business model. Um, they not only— we talked about this with Linear, which is interesting, where you have this design system identity that flows through to pricing, right, with Linear. Similarly, what they've done is they've taken this identity of being a Firebase alternative and it's permeated their philosophy on everything else, right? So if you look at this page and you go to Firebase's pricing page, you will see the difference almost instantly, right? And I think that's kind of the strategy they've taken here and what's resonated a lot in the market.

I think that's an incredible kind of breakdown and observation. There are kind of a couple of things that came to mind for me when you were speaking. To me, what was just obviously noteworthy about their pricing is they're clearly playing this long game with developers. And it builds loyalty. It positions them, you know, as, as kind of the go-to for a very long time. And I think secondly, to underline your point, they've understood just how powerful it is to be predictable with pricing. They've understood how important it is to not surprise their customers. And I think that that's been like, you know, quite effectively done. The, the mention of how they've counter, counter positioned against Firebase is like really interesting. And I feel like if you kind of look at them over the last few years, like it was clearly they are the Firebase alternative, but Jez, are they also counter-positioning against Auth0? Because when you look at the Pro plan, you know, they're what, giving you 100,000 monthly active users for $25 a month. And I'm pretty sure that Auth0 is like $35 a month for 500 active users. So I'm curious kind of what your take is on that, if you have one.

I mean, that's a good question. I don't, I don't, I think it's sort of secondary as a value proposition, frankly. I mean, like ecosystem integration is really important for these types of tools. And it sort of becomes like a— you sort of have to offer these things to be fully integrated and competitive. I think they probably were some of the first or one of the first tools to kind of do it. I don't think they necessarily look at Auth0 and say, I'm stealing customers from Auth0. I think they look at the market and they say, well, when someone starts a project, they're going to have a choice. And that choice is start with us or start with Appwrite or start with some other alternative. And I need to be competitive with that from an application database or a database service kind of perspective. And then everything else, you know, I think these other tools have to have auth too, etc. And so they're sort of just competing with them from a feature perspective. And the reason why I think that that's the case is I haven't really studied Auth. If you go to their Auth sort of section here, you go up a little bit, they have basic MFA, they have, you know, some advanced phone MFA. But like, if you're really looking for an auth solution that's like fully featured, they probably don't compete. Within Auth0. Like Auth0 is going to have way more features than Supabase. Like you're only competing on like basic functionality probably. And so like, I don't necessarily see that dimension from a competitive perspective, but it could be.

Gio, take us through your observations on the pricing page itself, the anatomy and the design of this page. What do you like and what are maybe kind of opportunities for improvement if you've noticed any?

One thing we've talked about is any pricing page has to feel approachable and simple, even if under the hood or below the fold, there's a lot of complexity and configuration. And I think they've threaded that needle well here. They've got at the top just the 3 main good, better, best plans. The one that's most popular is Signaled. And actually there's quite a lot of complexity here. There's all kinds of features that are subject to overages. There's a specific free plan pause policy, which is understandable, but again, another wrinkle of complexity. You've, you've got here like a lot of explicit examples around what you can expect your compute to look like or your compute costs to look like. To, to Jaz's point about like philosophically, they, they want to be predictable pricing and that's like a differentiator for them and part of how they go to market. And, and it's really cool to see that opinion imbued in everything. And how like thoughtful and intentional they are about that. Then as you keep going, you've got more add-ons. This, I think this goes to, uh, a docs article with specific, um, detail about other add-ons. And then if we go back to the pricing page, there's a whole section here that the add-on for CAS cost control, the add-on for custom domain, the add-on for point-in-time recovery. And then when you go to the full breakdown, there's just a ton here. Every single one of these features has a little explainer. Many of these features have an overage charge. Um, it feels really configurable. It feels like you won't be surprised by the price. It feels like it really tries to grow with you. Um, and I just, from a design standpoint, you can get the gist of it here and scroll to learn more and, and get all the information you need. And if there's something you don't know, there's a doc article that directly addresses it. So to me, really well done.

There's so much here that's so interesting. I think that docs article is a good call out, right? I don't— there's very few companies we've looked at that go to such lengths to be so transparent about how they built, right? And how they sort of construct billing. The other thing that I didn't mention earlier that is notable is if you go to the very bottom and you look at cost control, the FAQ on cost control, can I cap my usage so my bill doesn't run over? What you'll notice is they're opt-out on cost control, um, and that's incredible, right? They basically, they say, look, everyone's on cost control unless you really want to be subject to usage-based billing, right? Um, and so there's, to your point on thoughtfulness, incredible how thoughtful they have been to make sure that the neurosis you have against usage-based tools, especially as a developer, especially as a builder that may not be super nervous about, or may be super nervous about being billed for a $30,000 bill or something that you don't understand, that just doesn't happen with them.

Just to underline that point, I mean, that thoughtfulness to me just suggests they view pricing as like it is a part of their product, 100%. Um, they view it as such, they treat it as such, they think about it constantly, they revisit it all the time.

It's part of the UX.

It's part of the UX, yeah. It's part of the full experience with, with, with the company. Um, yeah, I'm so impressed with their FAQ. Like, I think it's probably the best FAQ we've seen for many, for many of the pricing pages that we've looked at so far. Does anybody want to kind of say anything else about the pricing page before we move on?

I think it does a little bit. This point relates also to what we talked about with kind of if you're going to be a dev tool and you're going to be focusing on long tail downmarket, kind of low, lower ACV side projects, things like this, like you can choose to be like the best or the cheapest basically. And there's not a lot of other room for competitive vectors and It's similar to what we said about Vercel. Like, if you're going to be the best and you're going to have a lot of users, this transparency point is like a big part of that kind of trade-off matrix.

All right, so let's do a quick grade here before we move into kind of purchasing experience. I'm going to give the pricing pitch here a 5, 5+. Can't find any way to critique it. Anybody want to throw them something lower than a 5?

I don't think I would. I mean, I think like we talk a lot about the mechanics of pricing pages, but there's also this aspect of how they make you feel. And I think this just makes you feel like you're considered, right? And so like, definitely like a 5 for me in terms of like what they put together here and the identity that, that sort of like threads through it.

I also feel like it's really well done. Maybe if I could, if I could dream up an improvement, it would be some interactivity around previewing what your bill will be. And granted, like, I don't see this often. It's a nice to have, but when there's this much complexity, one way to have people understand it or feel it out is like not just make them read a bunch, but also ask them a question like, how much traffic do you get? Or how much storage do you need? Or ask a few questions that help them size up roughly what their bill might look like or what plan is best for them. Again, this is like luxury Ferrari-level type pricing page. Functionality, but you know, they're already great. If I wanted them to be even better, that's one thing they could try to do.

Yeah, I like it. I think it's a good idea. Ben, anything you'd add?

No, I really like it. I think the need to focus on instance type is kind of interesting to me. I could see pros and cons there, but in general, I really like it.

All right. So largely 5s all around for Supabase's pricing page. We're going to make this episode a two-parter. We're going to come back next week and go really deep onto the purchasing experience. From onboarding through expanding with the product. So stay tuned for that, guys. Talk to you next week. Thanks a lot.