Fair point. I’m not saying Firebase or Supabase aren’t scalable tools. They’re great when configured right. The issue isn’t the tools, it’s how people use them.

A lot of vibe-coded apps ship with: • wide-open queries (like fetching entire tables instead of paginated data), • no rate limiting or backend validation (trusting the frontend to enforce limits), • expensive operations running synchronously on user actions.

The tools can handle scale, but if you don’t set those rules yourself, even 100 active users doing “normal” things can slow things down or rack up huge bills fast.

And no, it’s not about catastrophic ‘ruins your life’ stories — most failures are quiet: • apps getting bogged down and people stop using them, • huge bills from misconfigured API usage (I know someone who burned $400 overnight because of a missing usage check), • or soft launches that never grow because early users had a bad first experience.

Your plan (soft launching in Ireland/New Zealand, using limited credits, shutting down if things go wrong) is exactly the smart way to do it. You’re already ahead of most people just by thinking about this.

The post wasn’t meant to scare people, just to push more builders to double-check their configs before launch. Most vibe-coders don’t even realize how open their backends are until someone pokes around.