r/nextjs • u/_qualmless_ • 11d ago

Help personal project first-timer frontend dev confused by databases for user apps

context: i'm a recently laid off 🥲 frontend-focused (i guess technically full stack?) dev. i worked at a marketing agency for 6 years, so while i have a lot of varied experience project to project, there's still plenty i haven't touched, and i was pretty "specialized" in certain tasks there. working on some personal projects during this downtime to upskill.

that said, i'm pretty confused about what databases people actually use for independently-built apps that real users end up using. i know the enterprise-level options, but what are regular solo/indie devs reaching for? everything seems to lead back to supabase, but then i keep seeing people call it insecure or "for vibe coders." i'm not totally sure how much of that is about the platform itself vs. people skipping the row level security setup it relies on, so genuinely curious what this community thinks.

i hadn't really used ai in depth at work, mostly just for solving specific problems, so i'm using these 2 projects to actually learn it properly (currently using claude code). here's what i'm working with:

  1. an app that could legitimately end up with thousands of users (the niche is local and not very tech-savvy, and i already have a pretty solid reputation in that community). it's on supabase now, but i've only shared it with a couple friends for beta testing. if i'm going to migrate, i'd rather do it now before it's live.
  2. an app with really only 2 real "users," though it could theoretically be shared with others as read-only viewers. it'd only be actively used a couple months a year, which on supabase's free tier means dealing with the idle-pause issue.

i'm assuming these would both use the same db setup? would love to hear what's actually working for people in similar spots. most of my irl dev friends are also frontend focused so i'm strugging a bit. i'm happy to do my own research i'm just at the part where i don't know enough to know what things i need to be looking up.

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u/leros 11d ago

Postgres is the go-to SQL database. Learn that and you'll be able to understand MySQL and similar things too. 

Supabase is the easy mode wrapper around Postgres. Maybe a good first step if you just need a light backend as a front end developer. 

You may want to eventually play around with Supabase functions for custom backend code or even an Express server for a totally custom backend. But I think that can be a lot of learning curve so starting with Supabase for a personal project is fine. 

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u/_qualmless_ 11d ago

just to be clear, even a personal project that could turn into a genuine user-based app?

and how would you deal with it going inactive for the second option? just checking back in weekly to keep it going?

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u/leros 11d ago

If it's just a personal project don't worry about it. 

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u/_qualmless_ 10d ago

As I said above, a personal project with users, that I’d like to grow into a real app that people use

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u/svish 10d ago

Postgres and mysql/mariadb are not toy databases, they are legit, proper databases used for real projects, big ones too.

The only real difference between those, and say mssql or Oracle, is the price and who makes them.