One account instead of four vendors: database, auth, email, storage

What one Scribase project replaces

Everything in the middle column is live on scribase.com today and reachable from one project URL with one anon key, through the unchanged supabase-js client. The right column is the honest part: what still needs its own key or is not there yet.

Sources: Scribase docs: Auth, Scribase docs: Mail

How many keys you end up with

A Scribase project has one URL, one anon key for the client and one service key for the server, the same shape supabase-js already expects. Auth, Storage, Realtime, REST and Functions all sit behind that URL, so the app has one .env entry pair instead of one per vendor.

Email is the exception today: Mail Studio is a separate product with its own API key, the same way a Resend key is separate from a database password. It is the same vendor, one support address and one console, but it is a second key in .env. We say so here rather than on an invoice.

• Database, auth, storage, realtime, functions, queues, cron: one project URL, one anon key, one service key.
• Email: a second key (SCRIBASE_MAIL_KEY), same vendor.
• Control plane (creating projects, branches, backups from a CLI or an agent): a personal access token or a scoped agent token, never pasted into the app.

What the four-vendor stack costs next to one project

Entry prices from each vendor's own pricing page. The point is not that Scribase is always cheaper; it is that a small app on four free tiers is usually one tier away from four separate bills, and that bill adds up before the app has revenue. On Scribase, 1 project free with no time limit (0.5 GB database, 1 GB files, no card); a further project is $5 a month on Hobby or $25 on Pro, and new accounts start with 14 days of Hobby.

Sources: Supabase: Pricing, Neon: Pricing, Clerk: Pricing, Resend: Pricing, Scribase: Pricing

Setting it up from one command

In an existing Expo, Next.js, SvelteKit, Nuxt, Astro, Remix, Express or Flutter project, one command creates the backend and writes the URL and anon key into the right .env file. A coding agent can run the same command with no account and claim the project later.

npx scribase init

import { createClient } from '@supabase/supabase-js';

export const db = createClient(process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_SCRIBASE_URL!, process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_SCRIBASE_ANON_KEY!);

// Sign in, upload a file, subscribe to changes: same calls as before.
await db.auth.signInWithOtp({ email });
await db.storage.from('avatars').upload(path, file);
db.channel('orders').on('postgres_changes', { event: 'INSERT', schema: 'public', table: 'orders' }, handle).subscribe();

import { Resend } from 'resend';

const mail = new Resend(process.env.SCRIBASE_MAIL_KEY, { baseUrl: 'https://mail-api.scribase.com' });
await mail.emails.send({ from: 'Acme <hello@acme.com>', to: [email], subject: 'Welcome', html: '<p>Hi.</p>' });

Two defaults the four-vendor stack does not give you

• It does not pause. An idle Scribase project scales its compute to zero and wakes on the next request; there is no inactivity pause on any tier and no cap on the number of projects.
• It refuses an unpoliced public table. A migration that would leave a table in the public schema without row level security is rejected by the migration runner with a 409 before it runs, and the free migration-lint tool shows the same finding in the browser before you deploy anywhere.