An unsuccessful project might be unsuccessful because it got eaten by costs before it became successful.
A wildly successful project is risky to migrate.
Most startups fail. Optimizing for getting revenue is more important than optimizing cost in the beginning.
If you get revenue you can solve the cost problem. If you don’t, it doesn’t matter.
Anything that gives you more shots at the goal is a win in a startup.
I've seen many colleagues bootstrap something - even if they're not themselves very technical - because they've leveraged these well integrated low cost platforms.
I think it’s rare that fails to show potential because of the underlying technology that’s chosen.
Sure, Vercel is relatively expensive. But I just don’t see how you’d throw in the towel because the costs are too high without first evaluating how to lower them.
If you’re saying that the evaluation is likely to show that you’re stuck - I have never seen that be the case personally.
All this is to say: even if all progress on AI halted today, it would remain the case that, after the Internet, LLMs are the most impactful thing to happen to software development in my career. It would be weird if companies like Supabase weren't thinking about them in their product plans.
Based on the “vibe coders” crowd I see on X, they are a superset of indie hackers with lower barrier to entry when it comes to coding skills and less patience for mediocre success. They seem to have the “go big or go home” mindset.
As long as they have a popular product, they don’t mind forking over some of their profit to OpenAI or a hosting provider. None of the Ghibli generator app creators complained about paying OpenAI… If the product is not popular, no outrageous costs, and the product will be abandoned anyway very fast.
Not necessarily applicable to vibing with Supabase specifically, right?
There are several ways to host Supabase on your own computer, server, or cloud.
Migrating from it is not that hard so far. I did it on an afternoon for a customer.
Also a couple friends are running the open source version in their own containers.
Maybe there are (or will be) cloud only features, but for the basic service there isn’t as much lock-in as something like AWS.
With Vercel/Netlify, you're paying for ease of use. For a lot of people, that tradeoff is worth it. Not everything can be free.
https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/computer-programm...
Do you have a better source for your number.
As far as cost, 200/month is nothing, but those are not the numbers we hear about when things spiral out of controll due to a ddos or sudden surge in popularity.
But the market rate for a freelance midlevel US-based engineer would be about double per hour what you'd pay a full-time employee of the same level, to account for taxes/PTO/health care/etc.
Starts?!
I remember getting a sheet from an employer early in my career that fully broke down the cost of benefits and taxes and showed me the full cost of just my employment, not including overhead, profit, etc. it was rather eye opening because although I kid of knew it from accounting and finance, it never really impacted me quite as much before seeing the numbers.
Yes, “vibecoding” still has issues (and likely will for the forseeable future). I’m sure the next decade will be an absolute boon for security researchers working with new companies. But you shouldn’t dismiss people based on their use of these tools.
And other commenters are right that these expensive infra tools can be replaced later when the idea has actually been validated.
