Roboflow.com choose Supabase to power Paint.wtf leaderboard

Summary

Brad Dwyer and Erik Dunteman created Paint.wtf to experiment with OpenAI's CLIP model, allowing users to draw images evaluated against text prompts and scored on a leaderboard. While the team initially considered Firebase, the platform lacked built-in document counting functionality essential for their leaderboard architecture. To avoid implementing custom workarounds or exporting data to external systems, they selected Supabase to leverage PostgreSQL's native counting capabilities. After launching on Hacker News, Reddit, and Product Hunt, the platform experienced viral traffic that peaked at over two drawing submissions per second and surpassed one hundred thousand participating users within twenty-four hours. The PostgreSQL-backed infrastructure maintained reliable performance throughout the surge, delivering accurate and up-to-date score rankings under heavy load.

Context

Brad Dwyer and Erik Dunteman sought to build a weekend project called Paint.wtf to experiment with OpenAI's CLIP model for ranking user drawings against text prompts. To power the application, they needed a leaderboard system capable of ranking submissions, but initial tool candidate Firebase lacked built-in functionality for counting collection documents without external exports or custom increment triggers.

Approach / What changed

The team chose Supabase to take advantage of PostgreSQL's native counting capabilities for the leaderboard architecture without needing extra add-ons. They built the application overnight and deployed it to support user submissions evaluated by OpenAI's CLIP model.

Takeaways

• OpenAI's CLIP model evaluates drawings by converting image classification into a text similarity task, avoiding the constraints of fixed category labels and traditional supervised learning.
• Firebase lacked native support for counting documents within a collection, whereas PostgreSQL provided built-in counting suitable for real-time leaderboard rankings.
• Built with Supabase and launched overnight, Paint.wtf scaled across Hacker News and Reddit traffic spikes, handling more than 100,000 user submissions within 24 hours.

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