Smash Notes

Back to Why Agents Love Supabase, with Paul Copplestone & Ant Wilson.

How Much Does Supabase Spend on AI Coding?

Paul Copplestone says Supabase does not set one AI coding policy for the whole company. Product teams already choose their own tools and habits, and coding agents were left the same way. A few cost rules are starting to line up. He still wants each team to decide.

Shawn Wang asks how much the company spends and whether the bill is a worry. Copplestone answers with who decides, not with a company-wide cap. Because the company is remote, decisions are written down, so he can ask an assistant what the bill is. The figure he gives is about $300,000 a month for about 450 people. He first says 600 and corrects it to 450. Hiring is fast, so the bill moves with headcount when the tools give the team leverage.

Transcript

Why Agents Love Supabase ·

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast

More from this episode

  1. Why Do AI Agents Need Compute Next to the Database?Paul Copplestone says Supabase Edge Functions, which run on Deno, stop at about two seconds.
  2. Why Did Supabase Rewrite the Postgres Operator?Paul Copplestone says every Postgres operator they tested could lose data under some condition.
  3. Why Is Supabase Preparing for Billions of Databases a Month?Paul Copplestone says Supabase already launches about 5 million databases a month, and the agent path they are planning for is billions a month.
  4. Why Do AI Coding Agents Activate Faster Than Human Signups?Paul Copplestone says the latest jump in Supabase signups came from the models getting better, not from a marketing spend.
  5. Why Do AI Coding Agents Keep Choosing Supabase?Shawn Wang says his tracking of model answers shows frontier models recommending Supabase as the default integrated backend: the database, auth, functions…
  6. Does Supabase Track Open Source Adoption?Paul Copplestone says Supabase deliberately does not measure how far the open-source project has spread.
  7. How Does Supabase Pay Its Sales Team?Paul Copplestone says Supabase pays sales only for the growth a help call adds on top of growth the account would have shown anyway.
  8. Why Won't Companies Migrate a Production Database?Paul Copplestone says a move from one production database to another almost never happens, and he would bet it almost never will.
  9. Why Were AI Coding Agents Breaking Postgres?Paul Copplestone says a database is harder to leave than a frontend tool, which is why Supabase can stay stickier than a coding app such as Lovable.
  10. Why Can't an AI Agent Read a Folder of SQL Migrations?Paul Copplestone says an agent cannot see the shape of a database from a folder of SQL migrations. Each change adds another file.
  11. Where Did the Supabase Co-founders Meet?Shawn Wang says Paul Copplestone and Ant Wilson, the Supabase co-founders, went through Entrepreneur First in Singapore, each on a different company, and…

People

More answers like this

More with Paul Copplestone

Related episodes

Plays from this note through the rest of the episode.

Note

Weekly highlights

One letter a week.

The notes worth hearing, with the minute they were said.