When would you choose self-hosting Supabase over the managed cloud offering?

Because Supabase's stack is fully open source, self-hosting is a real option, not just a fallback, and the deciding factor is usually a specific constraint the managed cloud can't satisfy rather than cost alone.

Data residency and compliance requirements are a common driver: an organization that must keep data inside a specific country or private network the managed cloud doesn't offer a region for may need to self-host on their own infrastructure. Similarly, teams already running everything inside a private VPC with strict network isolation policies, or needing custom Postgres extensions the managed platform doesn't enable, often self-host to get full control over the underlying environment.

The trade-off is real operational ownership: patching and upgrading each component (Postgres, PostgREST, GoTrue, Realtime, Storage) yourself, managing backups and high availability, and handling scaling that the managed cloud otherwise absorbs. For most startups and small teams, the managed cloud's Pro or Team tier is the more practical default, and self-hosting tends to make sense once an organization has both a concrete compliance or infrastructure requirement and the platform engineering capacity to operate it.

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