Should I Stick With Supabase or Consider Another Backend Database?

One drawback I ran into with Supabase was inactivity pausing on the free tier. If the project sits unused for a while, it may need to be reactivated, which can be annoying for a low-traffic site. SQLite avoids that kind of hosted-service behavior, but you give up some of the built-in scaling, multi-user concurrency, and backend features. The best choice depends on whether convenience or simplicity matters more for this project.

For a very lightweight project, Cloudflare D1 could be worth checking out. It uses SQLite and can be convenient for smaller applications deployed around Cloudflare’s infrastructure. Just keep in mind that SQLite-based services have different concurrency, scaling, and feature limitations than PostgreSQL.

A straightforward alternative is running PostgreSQL on a small VPS. You get the flexibility and power of Postgres without paying for a full backend platform, and it can stay inexpensive for smaller projects. The trade-off is that you’re responsible for updates, backups, security, monitoring, and scaling. It also won’t give you hosted authentication or realtime features out of the box.