Self-hosting Supabase: Is It Worth It?
Supabase is popular. Supabase OSS is free and open source. On the surface, self-hosting Supabase looks appealing—keep your data in your cloud, avoid vendor lock-in, save money. But the reality is more complex. Self-hosting Supabase OSS means maintaining PostgreSQL, RealtimeDB, GoTrue auth, Storage, and Vector services yourself. The operational burden is substantial. Features lag behind the hosted product. And the cost of running and maintaining these services often exceeds hosted Supabase pricing.
The Appeal of Self-Hosting Supabase
Self-hosting sounds attractive: deploy open-source code, control your data, own your infrastructure. For small deployments, it works. As scale increases, the reality shifts. Keeping Postgres in sync across environments, managing replication, handling backups and recovery, updating components—it all takes ops resources. Time spent on maintenance is time not spent on product.
Many teams start by self-hosting, then hire ops staff as complexity grows. The "free" open source product silently becomes expensive through headcount.
What You Get with Hosted Supabase vs. Self-Hosted
Hosted Supabase includes managed backups, multi-region replication, built-in disaster recovery, and zero-downtime scaling. The self-hosted version gives you raw components that you assemble. Missing pieces like observability dashboards, security patching, version upgrades, and debugging tools are your responsibility.
Feature parity is also an issue. Hosted Supabase gets new features, performance improvements, and security fixes faster than the OSS version. Self-hosted teams often lag behind.
The Operational Reality
Running Postgres in production is non-trivial. Regular backups, WAL archiving, replication setup, connection pooling, scaling—each requires expertise. The RealtimeDB component needs careful tuning for low latency. GoTrue requires identity and access management knowledge. Storage requires managing object lifecycle and permissions.
When something breaks—and it will—you're on call. No support team to escalate to. Your engineers debug infrastructure rather than features.
The Hidden Cost of Self-Hosting
A typical self-hosted Supabase team spends 1-2 FTE on operations. That's $120K-$240K per year. Add infrastructure costs—persistent compute, managed databases, object storage for backups. The total often exceeds hosted Supabase pricing, especially when you factor in downtime risk and the opportunity cost of lost engineering productivity.
For teams smaller than 50 people, the ROI on self-hosting is poor. Hosted services are cheaper. For larger enterprises with dedicated DevOps teams and regulatory requirements, self-hosting makes sense only if compliance demands are unmet by hosted options.
When Self-Hosting Makes Sense
Self-hosting is worthwhile for organizations with strict data residency requirements (GDPR, HIPAA, FedRAMP), dedicated ops teams, and the need for deep customization. If your industry demands you keep all data on-premises or in a specific jurisdiction, self-hosting (or BYOC) is necessary.
But don't self-host just to avoid vendor lock-in or save money—the math rarely works unless you have economies of scale.
Why Vela is Different
Vela offers BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud)—you run it in your account, not Vela's. But unlike self-hosted Supabase, Vela handles the complexity. Vela manages scaling, backups, security patches, and replication. You get infrastructure in your cloud without the operational burden.
This bridges the gap between control and simplicity. You keep data in your VPC. Compliance is simple. But you don't need a dedicated ops team because Vela handles the heavy lifting.
The Verdict
If you're considering self-hosted Supabase, be honest about the operational cost. If compliance or data residency is the driver, explore BYOC options like Vela that give you control without the burden. If cost savings is the motivation, the math rarely works—hosted services are usually cheaper when you include ops headcount.