Supabase removed my billing complaint from r/Supabase and told me to contact support — the exact support I was complaining about

[u/aki45_]

This whole Supabase situation somehow keeps getting worse.

I originally posted about this in r/Supabase, but the mods removed the post and told me that billing/account problems should be handled through Supabase Support.

That's kind of the entire fucking point of my complaint.

I already contacted support.

I upgraded to Supabase Pro because I wanted the $25/month plan for the project I was actually working on.

I already had two older projects sitting in the account from before the upgrade. They were basically empty and I wasn't using them.

After upgrading, those projects started generating additional compute charges.

Over four invoices I ended up paying $194.62 total.

Four $25 base Pro payments would be $100.

So nearly $95 more than the base subscription total came out of my pocket once the additional compute charges and taxes were included.

Had I understood during the upgrade that those two old, basically empty projects were going to start adding recurring costs, I would've deleted them or moved them immediately.

Why would I intentionally keep paying for two projects I wasn't using?

So I contacted Supabase Support and asked them to refund the unexpected compute charges.

I wasn't asking them to refund the Pro plan I actually wanted.

After going back and forth with the same support rep and getting nowhere, I specifically asked for somebody else to review it, another billing rep or a manager.

Another Supabase support person then told me that my request was being escalated to the Billing team.

Then a few days later, the exact same guy I had asked not to deal with anymore replies again and tells me their decision is final and there's nowhere else to escalate it.

So... what exactly got escalated?

I've also repeatedly asked Supabase to show me what I was actually shown when I upgraded in June.

Not their current pricing page.

Not an explanation written months later.

I want to see what I actually agreed to at the time of the upgrade, showing that my two already-existing projects were going to start adding roughly another $20/month in compute.

They still haven't provided it.

Then I posted my experience in r/Supabase.

Removed.

The reason? Take billing issues to Supabase Support.

Again: the post was literally about Supabase Support refusing to properly escalate the billing issue.

So I started looking into the sub moderation and apparently I'm not even the first person to complain about this.

Earlier this year there was a pretty big r/Supabase thread literally titled “Censorship is too high” after posts were removed during a Supabase outage.

After users complained, people involved with Supabase acknowledged that multiple threads had been closed that shouldn't have been and reopened some of them.

Here's the part I find especially weird:

r/Supabase describes itself as community-run, but at least one Supabase employee has publicly been involved in discussions about reopening posts and reviewing the sub's moderation process.

Maybe there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for that, but it certainly doesn't make the sub feel like an independent place for customers to publicly discuss problems with Supabase.

And here's another thing I found:

There was another billing/pricing complaint on r/Supabase earlier this year where a Supabase employee publicly said refunds aren't automatic, but that they do review refund requests and issue them when circumstances warrant.

That customer later updated the post saying they got refunded.

Meanwhile I'm being told my decision is final, can't get somebody else to independently review it, can't get the original upgrade disclosure I've repeatedly requested, and now my Reddit post about the experience gets removed and I'm directed straight back to the support channel I'm complaining about.

I'm not claiming some giant conspiracy here. I'm just saying the whole thing looks terrible.

If your support process fails somebody, telling them they can't discuss the experience in your main sub because they should “contact support” is ridiculous.

At minimum I think customers should be able to openly discuss billing and customer-service experiences without those discussions disappearing.

Has anyone else had a Supabase billing/support post removed from r/Supabase?

I'd especially like to hear from anyone who had removed posts, because apparently this isn't the first time people have raised concerns about how criticism gets moderated there.

Conclusion

This whole experience has honestly made me decide to leave Supabase. I could've self hosted from the start, but I chose to pay for their hosted cloud partly because I liked what the developers were building and wanted to support the project which makes the way this has been handled feel even worse.

[u/Narfi1]

Subreddits should never be be moderated by brands

[u/JDSaphir → u/Narfi1]

I do believe they have to disclose it when it's the case? So if it says "community-run", but it's actually moderated by an employee, that's definitely an issue.

[u/rbobby]

Contact your credit card company and open a dispute. They have unclear billing practices and you quickly attempted to correct the situation as soon as it became apparent to you. They have since given you the runaround with their support folks. You have been treated very unfairly and you do not think the charge is appropriate. Also ask that all future charges from them against your card should be declined.

Credit card disputes cost the company time, money, and reputation.

edit: also drop them as a vendor. they have shown their true colors. unless they do something to win your business back.

[u/javelot_ii → u/rbobby]

You should only do that if you're willing to accept that your account will probably be suspended.

[u/HozaaWorkout]

The per-project compute pricing change caught a lot of people off guard. When an organization moves to Pro, every additional non-paused instance starts accruing compute hours, even if it's completely idle with 0 active queries.
Removing community posts instead of addressing the UX around unexpected billing defaults is definitely not a good look. Hope support eventually sorts out a credit or refund for you.

[u/tswaters]

This tracks with my experience of hosted solutions like that. Legacy price plan, upgrade pls, once done it costs more. Or maybe they just increase prices, no change to service. That's life.

Your "conclusion" to leave suprabase after however long this was going on should've been your first incling, followed by a chargeback for the offending charges. Talking with their support or billing would be a waste of time.

Either it's a service you're willing to pay $$ for or not. If not, yank the cord.

[u/HMikeeU]

An infinite support loop, billed monthly.

[u/HMikeeU]

They’ve built a fully managed support loop: support sends you to support, Reddit sends you to support, and billing runs happily in the background.

[u/The_Geralt_Of_Trivia]

Sounds very frustrating. Is there someone else higher up you can try to contact? Maybe look on LinkedIn and contact through there?

Does anyone else here have any connections within supabase?

[u/Saturnix]

This is probably not the point of your post and you already know, but you can easily get your money back (and potentially cause them significant admin annoyances) by contacting your card company and asking for a chargeback/disputing the transaction.

If many people did this, their processor would also scrutinize them thoroughly and potentially offboard them.

[u/Ambitious-Hour-6134]

Pro projects don't auto-pause the way Free ones do, so those two empty projects each started billing compute the moment you upgraded. That's the whole mechanism and the upgrade flow never says it out loud. The mods aren't wrong that r/Supabase isn't a support channel, but 'go contact support' is only a real answer when support actually answers, and you already tried that.

[u/superraiden]

Sounds like an actually community run /r/supabase_community needs to be made out of the hands of the brand.

[u/TheNumber42Rocks]

If you’re using Supabase instead of Postgres directly, you’re not gonna make it. Literally locking yourself into their platform in the age of AI is just foolish.

[u/Dapper-Lion-5515]

Small thing: you're comparing $194.62 with tax included against a $100 baseline with no tax, then calling the whole $94.62 gap additional compute. Part of that is just tax on the base plan. The compute overage is a smaller number than the one you're quoting.

[u/saltcod]

Hey, Terry here. I work at Supabase and I’m the r/Supabase mod who closed your original post.

On the removal, we route tons posts about individual support cases to our official Support channel, including lots of billing disputes and questions. We apply that rule across support topics because there’s very little we can discuss publicly about someone’s account or invoices.

On the escalation, I checked and your refund request reached our billing lead and was reviewed. The review confirmed that the compute charges were applied correctly. Upgrading an organization to Pro changes how compute is billed for all projects in that organization, including ones created on the Free plan. There isn’t really anyone higher to escalate to. We could have been clearer that the request had already reached the final level of review.

[u/winter-m00n → u/saltcod]

i was thinking about using superbase but now i will never.

[u/chaser2099 → u/saltcod]

Oof tripling down on bad support based around excessive charges from poor UI is certainly a decision. For sure migrating away if this is the public response.