Mobbin uses Supabase to authenticate 200,000 users

Summary

Mobbin originally launched its mobile design search platform using Firebase, quickly growing to hundreds of thousands of registered users. As the platform scaled, the team faced user friction because Firebase Authentication did not merge accounts sharing the same email address across different providers. Furthermore, mutative Firebase Function failures threatened document data integrity, and multi-round-trip document queries drove high monthly costs across five million API requests. To resolve these challenges, Mobbin migrated its backend to Supabase, adopting its GoTrue authentication service and underlying Postgres relational database. This migration resolved authentication conflicts, safeguarded data consistency, and reduced monthly infrastructure expenses since Supabase does not charge on a per-API-request basis.

Context

Mobbin originally used Firebase to launch their mobile design search platform, scaling to hundreds of thousands of users. At scale, Firebase Authentication did not merge accounts with the same email across different providers, confusing users trying to upgrade. In addition, failed Firebase Function executions threatened document data integrity, and document-based queries required multiple round trips across 5 million monthly API requests, elevating costs and slowing the website.

Approach / What changed

Mobbin migrated their backend to Supabase to use its GoTrue authentication system and underlying Postgres database. Although validating historical data integrity issues caused by past serverless function failures posed a challenge, moving to Supabase resolved login conflicts across providers, ensured relational data integrity, improved performance, and reduced monthly spending by eliminating per-API-request charges.

Takeaways

• Firebase Authentication caused account upgrade issues because it did not automatically merge accounts sharing the same email address across different providers.
• Mobbin faced data integrity risks when mutative Firebase Functions failed between executions and retries without strict validation.
• Migrating to Supabase and Postgres eliminated document query round trips and reduced monthly backend spending since Supabase does not charge per API request.

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