Back to Articles

Self-hosting Supabase: Is It Worth It?

• Vela Team • 8 min read SupabaseSelf-hostingOpen SourceCostVela

Supabase OSS is not Supabase Cloud. Self‑hosting means owning more than a database: you operate authentication, storage, realtime, REST, backups, upgrades, monitoring, and security. For many teams, the total cost of running and maintaining that stack outweighs managed options. If you want control without the heavy lift, Vela provides a full Postgres platform you run in your cloud with instant cloning, Git‑like workflows, and NVMe‑class performance.

TL;DR

  • Self‑hosting only makes sense when you truly need the scale and have the engineers to operate it reliably.
  • OSS Supabase differs from hosted Supabase — some features and integrations are not the same out of the box.
  • The real cost is engineering time: upgrades, incident response, HA/backup drills, security posture, and observability.
  • Vela gives you a single platform to manage in your cloud: Postgres + auth + storage + realtime + branching + instant clones.

Supabase OSS vs Hosted Supabase

Supabase Cloud combines Postgres with a suite of services (Auth, Realtime, Storage, Edge Functions, APIs, dashboard, billing, backups, metrics). The open‑source project is fantastic, but it is not a drop‑in replacement for the managed experience. Standing up the full stack requires Kubernetes, networking, storage classes, SSL, secrets, CI/CD and ongoing updates across multiple services. Some SaaS‑only capabilities and operational guardrails are not available when you self‑host.

The Hidden Costs of “Just Self‑Host It”

  • Operations: upgrades, patching, backups and PITR, schema migrations, HA failover drills.
  • Security: secrets, SSO, RBAC, network policy, audit, vulnerability response.
  • Observability: logs, traces, metrics, slow query analysis, capacity planning.
  • Reliability: on‑call rotations, SLAs, escalation paths, change management.
  • Cost dynamics: cheap raw servers can be offset by the people‑time to keep them fast and secure.

Community consensus often notes that self‑hosting makes sense only if you both need the scale and the RAM, and the cost of engineers to run it is lower than a managed service. For most teams, the answer is no.

When Self‑Hosting Can Make Sense

  • Tight data residency or isolation requirements.
  • Very large, predictable workloads where infra cost dominates and a seasoned platform team is in place.
  • Deep customization of extensions, network, or compute/storage topology.

How Vela Helps

  • BYOC platform: run in your cloud with Kubernetes + KubeVirt + high‑performance NVMe storage.
  • Instant cloning and branching: copy‑on‑write databases in seconds for testing, previews, and safe migrations.
  • Unified stack: Postgres, auth, storage, realtime and APIs with a single pane of glass.
  • Performance: low‑latency I/O and high IOPS without tuning EBS classes; great for AI/agent and OLTP+analytics mixes.
  • Total cost: fewer moving parts to operate, predictable spend, and no lock‑in to a hosted account.

What to Do Next

Compare platforms, try the demo, or estimate savings: