Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Alright, I’ve reviewed the latest “platform update” from our friends at Supabase. It seems they’ve been very busy finding new and exciting ways to protect our data, and by extension, our wallets. After a pot of coffee and three rounds with my calculator, I’ve translated their security manifesto into what it actually means for our Q3 budget. Here are my notes.
I’m particularly fond of the "new security defaults for 2026." It’s a wonderful feature that tells us the current defaults are, I suppose, suboptimal. It’s not a bug, it’s a future revenue stream. Let's do some quick math on this "proactive security posture." We have two engineers who will need to spend, let's be generous, three months updating our codebase to be compatible with these "defaults." That's a quarter of their annual salary, plus benefits, so roughly $90,000. Add another $50,000 for the "Supabase Migration Specialist" consultant we'll inevitably have to hire when our engineers threaten to quit. Total cost for this free security update: a mere $140,000.
They talk a lot about enhanced protections, which is vendor-speak for "new things we can meter." You want more granular access control? That will be priced per role, per query, per lunar cycle. Advanced audit logs? Great. We'll charge you for the storage, the compute to process them, and a special surcharge for any log entry that contains the letter 'E'. They sell you a fortress but charge you by the brick, and they're very proud of their "usage-based pricing." Funny, my electricity provider uses the same model, and I don't recall them ever claiming it's designed to save me money.
Let's discuss their claims of "preventing vendor lock-in" because they use open-source Postgres. That’s like saying a prison isn’t a prison because the bars are made of a common, widely available steel alloy. Sure, we can technically export our data. But what about the dozens of integrated functions, the authentication system our entire user base relies on, and the storage rules that are now hardcoded into every corner of our application? Migrating off this "ecosystem" wouldn't be a project; it would be a corporate archeological dig. The projected ROI on this platform is apparently 300%. My back-of-the-napkin math shows that after factoring in the cost of eventually escaping it, the ROI is closer to what you'd get from investing in a pet rock. A very, very expensive pet rock.
My favorite part is the unspoken promise that this complexity will make everything simpler.
“These changes will streamline your security workflow.” This is a masterclass in corporate language. "Streamlining" here means we now need to hire a full-time employee whose only job is to interpret the Supabase billing dashboard and attend webinars on "demystifying your egress charges." Let’s add another $110,000 to the running total for a "Cloud Cost Analyst." We’re now at a quarter-million dollars to implement a “free” security update.
So, in 2025, they’ve made changes that require our immediate attention, and in 2026, they’ll introduce more changes that will invalidate the work we just did. It’s the subscription model perfected: you’re not just paying for the software, you’re paying for the privilege of constantly rewriting your own code to keep up with it. It’s not a service; it’s a high-interest technical debt consolidation loan.
Honestly, at this point, I’m starting to think chisel and stone tablets had a better Total Cost of Ownership. At least you only had to buy them once.