Show HN: Supapool – a Supabase per coding agent in ~400 ms

Posted by kevo1ution 3 days ago

Counter30Comment8OpenOriginal

hi HN,

I built supapool.io, an ephemeral full copy of supabase's services that you can spin up in ~400 ms (Auth, postgres, storage, realtime).

so if you run multiple coding agents in parallel in different worktrees, they can now have their own copy of supabase without making changes that conflict with eachother.

> why not use supabase docker locally?

when I run 3-4 instances locally, my macbook gets hot and sometimes freezes.

> why not use supabase branches?

branches take minutes to setup, and are designed for persistence. this is expensive, and for a dev environment, it is too slow.

> why not use mocks?

mocks are bad for agents. i expect agents to test their migrations, SQL against real prod service behavior. agents hallucinate working mocks often. However, upside of mocks is that its faster and runs locally, but with supapool, the upside is less convincing.

> how does it work/how is this economically viable?

starting supabase in 400ms requires a few things: 1. a pool of ready supabase instances running warm, and colocated with region failover (us-east, us-west, europe-west, asia-southeast) 2. fast autoscaling when pool starts to shrink with microVM/firecracker 3. gutting strong persistence guarantees. dev agents don't need WAL, fsync, PITR, replication. anything for HA on a ephemeral supabase instance is bloat

its in beta right now, and i'm using our gcp credits to bankroll this, so its free. the eventual pricing will be something like $/instance second and more cost effective than branching or self hosting/maintaining a supabase cluster.

would love to get your feedback if you use supabase, and if you think there's something better that would fit your local coding agent setup. Thanks!

Comments

Comment by 2 days ago

Comment by swyx 2 days ago

whats your affiliation w supabase? arguably this name is close enough that people can reasonably confuse you as a supabase product. careful! but otherwise... good initiative that supa should probably offer first party

Comment by popalchemist 2 days ago

There are tons of projects with "supa" as the prefix, both related and unrelated. If Supabase were going to take legal action on this, they would have already.

Comment by kiwicopple 1 day ago

Fwiw we wouldn’t take legal action but sometimes we politely reach out if the name could cause confusion for customers - everyone has been very amicable and usually it’s a win/win to rename anyhow

Comment by swyx 2 days ago

its jut not a good starting point for any yc company so might as well rename now while its cheap

i dont speak for them but 100% this is close enough to home tjat they should be concerned

Comment by kevo1ution 2 days ago

we're not affiliated with supabase and this is a good point. wanted to be specific with the name like paloaltofooddelivery, but we'll likely rename as we add more different databases/services to support like clickhouse, stripe. curious if you have any that you want us to do

Comment by swyx 2 days ago

stripe is v good. clickhouse would be less exciting only bc its yet another db

Comment by hassanmehdi98 2 days ago

Interesting Idea! Any insights on how much more resources this would burn?

Comment by kevo1ution 2 days ago

should be less resources because the instances are lighter weight compared to their production equivalent. less durability/HA promises in favor of agent speed. currently measuring CPU/mem usage of each instance in the pool and cutting down more and more

Comment by lolllll 1 day ago

[dead]

Comment by 3 days ago