PLG company: Supabase

Every week, I will feature a PLG company and break down how they win.

Company and Product

Supabase – Cloud Database

Founded: 2020, fully remote team of ex-Founders and contributors from firms like AWS and Google

Funding: $398M raised (2025), including $196M by late 2024

Revenue & Valuation: $16M in revenue (2024), projected $27M in 2025, valued at $2B

Competitors: Firebase, PlanetScale, Render, Neon, Hasura, AWS

Industry/Category

Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) / Cloud Databases

Target User Persona

• Primary: Developers, startups, and indie hackers software quickly without too much backend ops

• Secondary: Technical teams at SaaS and enterprises migrating to Postgres

• Specific: Developers who value open source

PLG Model Used

Freemium + Self-Serve + Community Flywheel

• Free tier: Core features make it easy to self serve and get started

• Usage-based Upgrades: Scale to production, higher storage, enterprise cloud, and compliance

• Open Source: Developers have trust that with open source, they can self-host or contribute

• Community: Dev community and AI builders share word of mouth and become “SupaTroopers” on Discord and Slack

Time to Value (TTV)

Immediate (minutes):

• Start a new project, deploy Postgres

• Templates, CLI, and JS SDK make it easy to scale

Onboarding Experience

• Frictionless self-serve: Sign up, create a project, get instant API keys and database access

• Guided onboarding, documentation, AI assistant, and workflow templates for common app types

• Get started fast, with open docs, community answers, and Slack/Discord channels for help

Read more about community led growth:

Key Growth Loops/Virality

• Open Source Loop: GitHub stars, community PRs, and template repositories drive discovery and user advocacy

• Bottom-Up Adoption: As individual developer succeed, teams adopt Supabase for bigger projects; Slack/email invites expand reach

• Branded Projects: Demos and projects “built with Supabase” are shared on Twitter, Product Hunt, GitHub, and in portfolios, inspiring others with build in public

• Contributor Flywheel: Community submits features/fixes, which improves the platform and brings in more contributors and users

Read more about virality in SaaS:

PLG Compounding Strategy

Trusted by 1.7M+ developers, 80,000+ GitHub stars. For Supabase to become the fastest-growing backend platform, every developer gets value right away by spinning up a Postgres backend, APIs, and auth in minutes. No credit card or server knowledge needed. Users can build and share their Supabase-powered apps, friends, teammates, and the open source community can discover and try the platform.

Free users convert to paid as they need hosting, increasing volume, advanced features, and compliance.

Developers help out by fixing bugs, adding features, and sharing templates. The community shares tips and feedback.

Supabase’s “Product Led Moat” comes from instant developer value, freemium, an active open source community, and word of mouth. These ingredients make rivals to replicate. It becomes the go-to-tool for launching and running apps.

Read about other PLG Company Highlights:

• RB2B

• Wispr Flow

• MailMaestro

• Tally.so

• Granola.ai

• Tana.inc

• Shortwave

Read what these PLG companies have in common:

P.S. If you have 2 min, please take this three-questions survey about this newsletter for me @ https://tally.so/r/3EaPyl 

New here? Here’s what to expect each week:
- Monday: spotlight a lesser-known PLG company
- Tuesday: my PLG experience
- Wednesday: Memes on product, AI, and marketing
- Thursday: tactical growth tips
- Friday: raw accounts of my startup journey

I write daily*** about my learning on launching and leading PLG. Feel free to subscribe.

I am Gary Yau Chan. 3x Head of Growth. Product Growth specialist. 26x hackathon winner. Building ClarityInbox. I write about #PLG and #BuildInPublic. Please follow me on LinkedIn, or read about what you can hire me for on my Notion page.