Does Firebase make sense for an indie hacker?

It can be great for mvp, market validation, product/market fit.

Yep, can vouch for Firebase. Easy to learn, quick to setup and the Spark plan is free. Not too bad.

I use Firebase for Guidable (guidable.org). It was incredibly easy to set up (and was my first foray into NoSQL).

Things I liked:

• Their documentation is top notch (the best documentation I've read for any library/service).

• Their code examples and libraries are very plug-and-play.

• You get a scalable database up/running in minutes (not hours/days)

• Free tier to start

Things I didn't like (struggled a bit with):

• Your database URL is accessible to the world. You have to be careful and set access rules appropriately. This is a problem for any back-end-as-a-service, but it was the first time I'd dealt with it.

• That's really it (not really a Firebase problem, more of my own learning problems)

The authentication is easy to use and their databases too. But as soon as you wanna do some more complex queries like filtering a lot of data on different attributes you hit some limits what RTDB or firestore are not able to do.

I am using Firebase for two of my projects. Not necessary to setup and maintain server and security is my biggest reason. You can develop a small scale production ready application very quickly.

And NoSQL is sometimes painfully complex (especially Rules, if you have inter navigating nodes). And Firebase JSON data navigation UI is primitive, there are times I wonder is this the product developed by Google?

For the first project I did, we tried to roll our own authentication, had to make sure the servers were secure, make sure tokens were passed correctly, and all that jazz. A pain in the butt.

For my current project (harvy.app), I made sure I didn't have to have that headache again and went with firebase. Since it's just starting up, costs are minimal to 0 compared to having to host a server. Also, time to deployment was much quicker. Would definitely recommend.

Building an app with Firestore and pretty much everything else in firebase (analytics, crash reporting, remote config). Its honestly the best thing ever. Some people are saying its good for an MVP. Assuming its not a really complex service I would say it's scalable enough to go beyond MVP.

Firestore is still missing some important stuff (validating transactional data across multiple documents, query by list of ids) but then again it's still in beta. Would definitely recommend

I am also using Firebase for a couple of my projects including Requestly (www.requestly.in) for authentication, hosting files and sharing rules with other users.

IMO, It totally makes sense to start with Firebase as it is very easy to setup and it reduces development cost drastically so when you need to validate your idea, do product market fit evaluation, prototype go for firebase.

Lack of writing a backend code hurt sometimes but most of the times you can do it with Cloud Functions but since cloud functions are like instances, they run, execute and die.

There are some things you can miss like Something you evaluate using cloud functions and may want to cache. You don't have any other option but to write it back to Firebase or reevaluate every time.

I have also seen a few blog posts complaining scaling issues with Firebase DB. One possible example could be

• Suppose you store users profile in firebase as a flat list like /profile/users/{userId}. Now you app gets 100K users that mean 100K nodes directly under one node and it becomes pain to traverse the users and maybe add one more attribute.

Hope it helps!

Yes! It's a straightforward way to get a lot of the basic site functionality (db, auth, storage, functions etc) with very little effort or learning curve and much reliability and scalability. The free tier is reasonable and the payed tier is pay-as-you go at reasonable rates.

The most difficult aspect I found was structuring my data so that it can be most efficiently queried/extracted from the database and also setting up the db access rules. (both of these are particular to their realtime db).

Totally! We used it at Sworkit and it was pretty great from the early days to over 20 million downloads.

Their authentication is the easiest I've seen. Even teams that have no Firebase experience can implement it in short order.

Also I agree with others who say that the new Firestore database option is pretty slick. That's my standard goto now.

What used to just be a database is now a Google-backed suite of tools for app development. Give it a try and share your experiences here on IH ;)

Yes. Next slide.

Yep! I've been using it on a project for about a month -- the new Firestore database which is in beta has been really slick.

Indie Hackers actually uses Firebase authentication ( Log out and try to log in using the Twitter / Facebook / Google options and you can see the firebase url )

From my experience If you need simple queries then it is a great alternative