We likely agree that firebase is superb. But your criticism of using ‘alternative’ is unjust both in terms of the breadth of firebase, and why a competitor might target someone about to choose Firebase.
Somehow I've always read "Firebase alternative" as "alternative to Firebase Realtime Database" but now I see that what Supabase & co mean is "stuff you can put on a server once and then you won't need to do any backend stuff anymore", ie the current positioning of the Firebase brand.
I stand corrected.
(sidenote, Google's Firebase acquisition has to be one of the best-executed devtool acquisitions right? Nobody would've been surprised if they had just gobbled Firebase up, spread the team across GCP, put the product on life support and after a year told customers to just move to GCP proper, somehow. Instead they realized that "GCP Easy Mode" was worth having a separate brand for and they executed excellently on that)
It’s insanely lean to get started. But at the end of the day, its GCP underneath with GCP billing (i.e. no spend caps). The easy mode UX, and the risk of real expenditure, sit in contradiction to each other. Of course, there a very generous free tier to placate that. But things like realtime need to be used with real cost considerations, and not frivolously once you need a feature only available on pay as you go.
Either way, they are all rather broad products and many users only use subsets. Thanks for speaking up, appreciated.