Instant 1.0, a backend for AI-coded apps

ladon86

Looks very nice! I'll give it a spin for prototypes. Would love to check out /docs but it's currently a 404.

chrysoprace

Is InstantDB no longer about local-first or is the AI angle just a marketing thing?

jamest

They actually deliver on the promise of "relational queries && real-time," which is no small feat. Though, their console feels like it didn't get the love that the rest of the infra / website did. Congrats on the 1.0 launch! I'm excited to keep building with Instant.

asdev

I wonder if people really need this. How many people are really building multiplayer apps like Figma, Linear etc? I'm guessing 99% are CRUD and I doubt that will change. Even if so, would you want to vendor lock into some proprietary technology rather than build with tried and tested open source components?

ghm2199

For people like me — who are kind of familiar with how react/jetpack compose/flutter like frameworks work — I recall using react-widget/composables which seamlessly update when these register to receive updates to the underlying datamodel. The persistence boundary in these apps was the app/device where it was running. The datamodel was local. You still had to worry about making the data updates to servers and back to get to other devices/apps. Instant crosses that persistence boundary, your app can propagate updates to any one who has subscribed to the abstract datastore — which is on a server somewhere, so you the engineer don't have to write that code. Right? But how is this different/better than things like, i wanna say, vercel/nextjs or the like that host similar infra?

nharada

This is super cool and exactly what I've been looking for for personal projects I think. I wanna try it out, but the "agent" part could be more seamless. How does my coding agent know how to work this thing? I'd suggest including a skill for this, or if there's already one linking to it on the blog!

minantom

how is this better than vercel?

ghm2199

One thing I have always wanted to do is cancel an AI Agent executing remotely that I kicked off as it streamed its part by part response(part could words, list of urls or whatever you want the FE to display). A good example is web-researcher agent that searches and fetches web pages remotely and sends it back to the local sub-agent to summarize the results. This is something claude-code in the terminal does not quite provide. In Instant would this be trivial to build? Here is how I built it in a WUI: I sent SSE events from Server -> Client streaming web-search progress, but then the client could update a `x` box on "parent" widget using the `id` from a SSE event using a simple REST call. The `id` could belong to parent web-search or to certain URLs which are being fetched. And then whatever is yielding your SSE lines would check the db would cancel the send(assuming it had not sent all the words already).

shay_ker

with a huge multi-tenant database, how do you deal with noisy neighbors? indexes are surely necessary, which impose a non-trivial cost at scale.

jvalencia

How does security and isolation work? If someone else's account is compromised, how do I know I won't be? If instant is compromised, how do I know I won't be?

storus

An honest question - why would we need any frameworks at all for vibe coded apps? I can just tell the coding agent to use pure HTML5/Vanilla JS/CSS on the frontend and pure whatever on the backend and it would do it. No need for hundreds/thousands dependencies. For deployment I can ask the coding agent to do the same.

singpolyma3

Seems like a supabase competitor?

pugio

Thanks, this might be exactly what I'm looking for. I see you have support for vanilla js and svelte, but it's unclear whether you can get all the same functionality if you don't use React. Is React the only first class citizen in this stack?

truetraveller

Moose here, congrats! This is the real "firebase alternative", not Supabase. Supabase is good, but it's just hosted Postgres + user login. People who are asking "why would I need this" don't get how difficult scalable data storage is with user permissions. Would absolutely recommend this if it's good. Been in this space for ~7 years, and made a high-perf realtime DB as well. Will contact you guys directly. Some concerns for everyone's benefit: 1) Transparency on pricing: This builds confidence. Need to know exactly what I pay for additional egress/ops (read/write). "unlimited" is not sustainable for the provider (you). For example, Firestore has detailed pricing that makes scaling sustainable for them. see https://cloud.google.com/firestore/pricing . 2) Transparency on limits: Req/s, max atrributes, max value length, etc. What about querying non-local non-indexed data (e.g. via server-side call), that's costly for you guys. So, what's the limit? 3) Simpler code in the docs/examples overall. Currently, they're not bad, but not great. For example, change the "i" used everywhere to "inst" or "idb". Assume dev is a noob! 4) Change simplify/terminology used. This is probably the most important, but hardest thing. Internally, keep the same triple structure. But dev just cares about tables/key/val. Or tables+rows. Namespaces/entities are confusing. Also, be consistent/clear. For example: "Namespaces are equivalent to "tables" in relational databases"..Perhaps you meant "namespaces are just a list of tables/entities"..slighly different, but far clearer I think? "Attributes are properties associated with namespaces"...I though attributes are associated with entities? Please keep in mind, I am completely new to InstantDB, so need to study the architecture more. 5) Simplify docs BIG TIME. And add an API REFERENCE (super important). Right now, you have: Tutorials, Examples, Recipes, Docs, Essays. These are all essentially "docs". 6) Simplify the "About" section. Should be 1/10th the size. Right now, it's like a fruit salad of docs, and re-iterating the features/benefits. Instead, put pics of both founders. Maybe investor list. Pics of your office?

zbiggistardust

What's the difference between Instant and Convex?

owenthejumper

This is basically a fancy Pocketbase / Supabase?

nl

What does "X Team Members per app" mean? Is this the number of users you can have registered or does "Team Member" have special meaning?

jgeurts

Is there a way to pair this with an existing (Postgres) database?

dalmo3

Congrats on the launch! InstantDB is a joy to work with. Granted, I've only ever built small toy projects with it, but it's my go-to. Just so much simpler than anything else I've tried in this space. The core product is so good that the AI emphasis feels weird. Hopefully that's just marketing and not a pivot. Unfortunate if that's what it takes to get funding these days.