Moving to Neon

RexaDB is a passion project. I built it for myself, and for anyone else who can get something out of it. I started it on Supabase for the backend, and at the beginning it worked really well. Later on, though, things got harder, and Supabase started limiting what I could actually do.

Auth was the breaking point

Auth is the part of Supabase I'd disliked for a long time. It's built on GoTrue, an authentication server that boxes you in with its limits. It's barely customizable, and once you start scaling and have real users, those limits stop being something you can work around. It kept frustrating me.

Then I built a small side project on Neon and found out that Neon's auth is built on Better Auth. That was exactly what I'd been looking for.

If you haven't come across Better Auth yet, it's probably the best open-source authentication framework out there. You can shape it to whatever your use case is, and choosing it early saves you a lot of time once real users show up.

Neon grew up

The other thing I found out late is that Neon now has serverless functions and object storage too. The last time I'd used Neon was a couple of years ago, and it's so much better than what I left behind.

Migrating without the pain

Moving everything over wasn't going to be simple, so I did the best thing I could think of: I built a transfer feature into RexaDB. It moves a project across providers, including your users, storage buckets and objects, and serverless functions. I tested it on multiple projects and cases to make sure it was ready for a production migration, and then I moved RexaDB itself over to Neon in about two minutes.

The people

I also reached out to the Neon team with some auth-specific suggestions, and they were welcoming and genuinely helpful. That's another thing I love about Neon. It's one of the best teams I've dealt with: nice people who care about their users and help you out quickly, whatever your situation is.

Branching

Then there's branching, which Neon makes simple to set up. You can have a development branch, a production branch, a branch for each pull request, and a whole set of developer-friendly features you get right out of the box.

Where things are now

RexaDB now runs on Neon, and you can use RexaDB to migrate your own projects from Supabase to Neon just as easily.

I'm not much of a technical blog writer, so that's it for now. Peace :)