For toy apps and initial prototypes the problem is they aren't going to get used so the rot is that they will be in a good-enough state to come back to when you get the time. With supabase the drop-in auth completely broke at some point, probably just a deprecation I didn't keep up with.

The postgres instance spins down when you aren't using it, which is understandable and I will say it works, it's just Postgres and you get the database dump if you need to move or come back a year later.

The nuance here is that you get the raw connection string + the postgREST API which all makes sense but you're choosing full cloud/client mode which is completely different from if you just went with the raw connection string behind a server layer. I kinda had to work through all of that learning on my own. The full client mode trade-off is that you'll be doing everything with that pattern, handling migrations, security, auth, it's just kinda... it's a whole thing. The public postgREST and row level security is a different paradigm.

as a professional dev, I would have just chosen the raw connection string and managed the database from the server until I outgrew it and I'd have the dev workflow already, it's just a Postgres db. Or sqlite to start, same reasoning it's all the same dev workflow, the problem is the cloud-hosting transition, which is why fully-managed cloud db accessible from an edge/client runtime is so alluring, but you're trading two very different ergonomics.

I'm thought-dumping, gotta run, hope this helps.