Supabase alternative
If it is the Postgres you want, and not the platform.
Supabase is a backend: Postgres with auth, storage, edge functions and realtime around it, metered as you grow. Lathe is the database part on a machine of your own, with the storage and 20 TB of traffic in one price. Some projects need the platform. This page is for the ones that found they only ever used the database.
What changes when the database moves.
- The bill becomes a number
- One plan price a month, from $15. Egress, storage within the disk, connections and requests are not counted, so the invoice matches the page every month.
- Nothing pauses
- The machine is on all month whether the project is busy or idle. There is no free tier that pauses after inactivity and no project to unpause before a demo.
- Standard Postgres, standard tools
- PostgreSQL 17, the upstream build, with pgvector, pg_stat_statements, pg_trgm and pgcrypto. psql, pg_dump, Prisma, Drizzle and every ordinary client connect as they do anywhere.
- A machine, not a slice
- Your CPU, memory and NVMe disk are yours alone. Nothing another customer does shows up in your latency.
- What you give up
- Supabase's auth, storage buckets, edge functions, realtime and the supabase-js client that ties them together. If your app is built on those, moving the database alone is a rewrite you may not want.
- What stays
- Row-level security, extensions, roles and SQL are Postgres features, not Supabase ones. They come with you.
Good for
- An app that uses Supabase for Postgres and little else
- A project whose egress or compute line has become the bill
- A side project that keeps getting paused
- A team that wants its database on a machine it can reason about
Questions
How do I move a Supabase database to Lathe?
pg_dump against your Supabase connection string, pg_restore into the Lathe instance, change the connection string in your app. Row counts on both sides tell you it worked. The 20 TB of traffic included covers the move many times over.
What about Supabase Auth?
It does not move; it is a Supabase service. Keep it and point it at nothing (it does not need your database), replace it with an auth library that stores users in Postgres, or stay on Supabase. This page is honest that auth is the usual reason people do not move.
Do I lose row-level security?
No. RLS is a PostgreSQL feature and works the same on Lathe. What you lose is Supabase's auth.uid() convention unless your auth layer sets the same session variable.
Is there a free tier?
No. Mini starts with a 3-day trial and no card; keep it past the trial and the first month is charged then.
Read next: Flat-price managed database, No egress fees, Never paused, never metered, Self-hosted VPS or managed, pgvector on your own machine, Neon alternative, Moving a Postgres database, Redis beside Postgres, A database for side projects, One machine, every engine. Every number on this page comes from the pricing page's facts.
The database part, on a machine of your own, from $15 a month.
Live about 90 seconds after checkout. Cancel any time; Mini starts with a 3-day free trial.
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