Part 1 — I rebuilt Supabase from scratch to understand what I was paying for

Part 1 of 7 — Self-hosting Supabase: a learning journey Supabase's free tier gives you two active projects: Postgres, authentication, storage, real-time subscriptions, a dashboard. All free. It works well. The problem is that it works so well you stop thinking about what is actually happening. When you click "Create project," a complete backend appears in about 30 seconds. You get a database connection string, an API URL, a set of keys. You paste them into your app and it works. This is convenient, but it is also a kind of blindness. You cannot reason about a system you do not understand. You cannot estimate its limits, predict its failure modes, or debug it with confidence. You just hope it keeps working. I have been using Supabase since a few months and I wanted to understand it better. So I decided to build the same thing from scratch on a cheap server, see every piece of it, make all the mistakes. Not to save money. The managed service is fairly priced and I will make that case at