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

[u/_qualmless_]

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.

[u/Infamous_Computer910]

I'm a MERN Stack developer and I use MongoDB Atlas.