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.

Takeaways

1. 1

   Firebase Authentication caused account upgrade issues because it did not automatically merge accounts sharing the same email address across different providers.

2. 2

   Mobbin faced data integrity risks when mutative Firebase Functions failed between executions and retries without strict validation.

3. 3

   Migrating to Supabase and Postgres eliminated document query round trips and reduced monthly backend spending since Supabase does not charge per API request.