Instant hopes to recapture some of the magic of Firebase before the Google acquisition by building a modern Postgres-based open source version.
Like the original Firebase, San Francisco-based Instant focuses on giving front-end developers easy access to a real-time database with offline capabilities without having to manage the back-end architecture. Masu. The service supports applications written in React, React Native, and vanilla JavaScript. In addition to the database, it also provides tools to manage authentication and permissions, as well as real-time features such as shared cursors and presence.
The team recently open sourced this project.
Instant was founded by former roommates Joe Averbukh (CEO) and Stepan Parunashvili. They previously worked at companies such as Wit.ai, Facebook, and Airbnb.
At Facebook, the architecture is set up to help you move quickly as a front-end engineer, Averbukh said. At Airbnb, on the other hand, the company's complex microservices architecture meant it took a long time to try out new ideas. “Thankfully, we already had Firebase within Airbnb that we could use for notifications, so it was really just a matter of prototyping these ideas using Firebase, and that was a huge win. ” he explained.
Image credit: Instant
Before starting Instant, the co-founders worked on developing fitness apps based on Google's Firebase. They liked all the features Firebase offered out of the box, such as optimistic updates and offline mode, but were disappointed that they couldn't access relational databases since Firebase focuses on NoSQL databases.
“This feature set is why apps like Figma, Notion, and Linear are winning in the market,” says Averbukh. “Basically, we think that just as today's apps are much better than their predecessors, people's expectations of what they want from an app will continue to rise, but the reality is , the way people build these features today is that they have entire teams building all these sync services.
At the core of all this is Aurora, AWS's relational database service. This allows Instant to quickly spin up new databases within a multi-tenant architecture that is cost-effective and provides strong security guarantees. Averbukh claims that whereas competitors like Supabase require launching a new database for each project (and free user), Instant essentially exists within one large Postgres instance. . He also emphasized that if a large enterprise customer signs up for the service, the team can suggest that the customer launch a separate database.
On Wednesday, the company announced it had raised $3.4 million in a seed round. In addition to Y Combinator and SV Angel, it is backed by prominent angel investors including former Firebase CEO James Tamplin, Paul Graham, Greg Brockman, and Jeff Dean.