One VPS.
A backend for every idea.

1. 01One project per stack.Self-hosted Supabase is a single project. Client number two means a whole second copy of everything, hand-wired, with no shared place to see or operate them.Projects are first class. The Console provisions them, and they share one install, one Traefik, one wildcard record.
2. 02“Back up and pray” upgrades.Version coupling between a dozen images, tags that move under you, migrations that do not replay onto an existing volume.One scripted path that keeps your volumes: ./deploy/update.sh for the platform, one command per project for the rest. You choose when each client moves.
3. 03MFA and SAML SSO live on the invoice.Hosted, they sit behind the paid tiers. Self-hosted, you assemble them yourself.TOTP with backup codes and trusted devices, passkeys, per-organization SSO, organizations, API keys. Every project, no tier, configured from Studio.
4. 04The self-hosted dashboard is the demo version.Half the screens you use in the cloud are simply not there, and logs want a separate analytics stack before they show you anything.Project Studio is the same product locally and in production: tables, SQL, auth, storage, realtime, policies, logs, advisor, backups, edge functions.
5. 05“It is just Postgres”It turns out to be Kong plus nine services you now operate, none of which you picked.Still Postgres, plus one Node API server per project. Real CREATE POLICY RLS, not an application-level policy DSL.
6. 06Default keys.Every self-host guide ships the same demo JWT secret, and a depressing number of installs are still running it. Internet-wide scanners know this.setup.sh generates every secret for your install. The bootstrap console password is temporary and must be replaced before the first real action.
7. 07Somebody else's account can pause your project.Region, jurisdiction and the power to suspend you are theirs, and it all goes in the DPA.Postgres, storage, auth and every key sit on infrastructure you picked, where you picked it. Backups are yours, on a schedule you set.
8. 08Writing the RLS policy is the easy half.Re-reading a policy expression only tells you what you meant, not what it does.An RLS simulator that really executes your query as the caller you name, inside a transaction that always rolls back, and tells you which gate closed.

If you want a free hosted backend for one side project and you would rather not administer a server, a hosted free tier is honestly the better deal, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. This is built for the other case.