self-hosting
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The Cloud With an Exit Door
Appwrite began as a backend its founder could not afford to host. Seven years later, that constraint has become the pitch: take the convenient cloud today, keep the right to leave tomorrow.
The Database That Learned to Disappear
Three Dropbox infrastructure veterans tried to spare developers from databases, queues and cache invalidation. Then coding agents arrived - and made Convex's opinionated backend look less like a shortcut than a new division of labor.
The Postgres Company That Let AI Write the Signups
It started as the open-source answer to Firebase. Then AI coding agents adopted it as their default backend, and Supabase doubled its valuation to $10.5 billion in eight months.
Appsmith
Appsmith is an open-source, low-code platform that lets developers quickly build internal tools - admin panels, dashboards, CRUD apps, and workflow automations - by dragging pre-built UI widgets onto a canvas and wiring them to databases and APIs with JavaScript. Founded in 2019 by Abhishek Nayak, Arpit Mohan, and Nikhil Nandagopal, the company positions itself as the developer-first, self-hostable alternative to closed platforms like Retool, and has expanded into AI-powered agents that give business teams context-aware automation on top of their own data.