73: Elixir at Supabase with Paul Copplestone
Thinking Elixir Podcast
Business Model and Realtime Origin Story
How Supabase monetizes via hosted tiers versus self-hosting, and the origin of their realtime system—replacing Firebase realtime with Postgres replication + Phoenix broadcasting.
We talk with Paul Copplestone, founder and CEO of Supabase. Supabase leverages the power of Elixir, Postgres, and more to create an OpenSource Firebase alternative that brings these powers to the Jamstack community. We cover TechCrunch’s coverage of their funding and how Paul considers Supabase as “the easiest way to use Postgres”. They offer a row-level security feature and we dig in to understand that. We go deeper on how an OpenSource company got VC funding and how their business model works. Paul shares how Elixir, Phoenix and PubSub solve some hard problems that other ecosystems just don’t handle and how Supabase helps those other communities get some of those benefits using the tools they already selected. Some interesting features are that you can self-host if you want, swap out different components, and the permissive licenses. It really seems to embody the OSS ethos. Great to learn about another company using Elixir to create a lot of business value!
Show Notes online - http://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/73
Elixir Community News
- https://github.com/elixir-protobuf/protobuf – Updates to the pure-Elixir Protobuf implementation
- https://twitter.com/whatyouhide/status/1455812251517063169 – Andrea Leopardi shares what's new and that the work done by Community.com
- https://www.erlang.org/news/151 – New Erlang website was launched
- https://www.erlang.org/doc/search – Check out the new full text documentation search!
- https://github.com/akoutmos/prom_ex/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md – PromEx was updated to v1.5 with new dashboard panels for Ecto and Phoenix
- https://twitter.com/wojtekmach/status/1457276012539138049 – Wojtek Mach shared a helpful PSA for macOS users and the new OpenSSL 3 version support issues
- https://github.com/wojtekmach/notebooks/blob/main/req_0.2.0.livemd – Req HTTP client library updated to v0.2.0. Includes new "Run in Livebook" button to demo usage.
Do you have some Elixir news to share? Tell us at @ThinkingElixir or email at show@thinkingelixir.com
Discussion Resources
- https://supabase.io/
- https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/09/supabase-raises-30m-for-its-open-source-insta-backend/
- https://github.com/supabase/supabase
- https://github.com/supabase/realtime – Elixir project
- https://coldfusion.adobe.com/
- https://firebase.google.com/
- https://jamstack.org/what-is-jamstack/
- https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/datatype-json.html
- https://github.com/cainophile/cainophile
- https://github.com/PostgREST/postgrest
- https://postgrest.org/en/v8.0/
- https://aws.amazon.com/amplify/
- https://plausible.io/
Guest Information
- https://twitter.com/kiwicopple – on Twitter
- https://github.com/kiwicopple/ – on Github
- https://paul.copplest.one/ – Blog
- https://supabase.io/ – Supabase website
Find us online
- Message the show - @ThinkingElixir
- Email the show - show@thinkingelixir.com
- Mark Ericksen - @brainlid
- David Bernheisel - @bernheisel
- Cade Ward - @cadebward
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