Instant 1.0, a backend for AI-coded apps

This seems really cool, I've used Pocketbase before for similar purposes, the only thing it doesn't offer is local-first (which is a bit of a bummer). But one very valuable feature it has is server extensibility. You can write server hooks in JS and Go (it's embeddable as a Go module) to add features you need. For example, in a previous project, I added functionality to send push notifications based on certain user actions. Is this kind of thing possible in InstantDB? Or, would I need to build a worker that listens for those events and fires off the notification on its own?

Also, are there plans to release SDKs in other languages (namely, Dart)?

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.

The "predefined patterns reduce token costs" framing resonates. We saw the same thing building empla.io. Every time we left a backend decision open to the agent, it burned 3x to 4x the tokens exploring before committing. The counterintuitive part is that declarative query languages save more tokens than they save for humans, because the agent does not have to plan imperative control flow step by step. Two open questions for the Instant team. How are you handling schema evolution when an agent decides mid-session that it needs a new relation? That is exactly where Supabase falls over for us. And do you expose a cost budget primitive per session, or does the user have to instrument that separately?

Apologies if it's due to lack of understanding from my end. But why is it 'for AI-coded'?

Don't get me wrong, as I look for some simple backend for an app I plan it does look another awesome alternative.

But what I'm not understanding is, what makes it 'ai-coded' focused?

And least, vs. other backends, it seems to be TS focused. do you have plans to have some drop-in bindings for (native) mobile platforms?

What a delightful demonstration. The AI hook is brilliant, but under-explained. I expected a paragraph on how to quickly get running with my assistant (edit: https://www.instantdb.com/tutorial seems to be that, though it focuses on using the SaaS and creating an account).

It’s fun to see highly reactive apps converging on Triples, Datalog and Clojure. I never got very warm with Clojure and find Datalog a little weird, so Instant‘s abstractions are highly welcome! Surely the InstantQL-Datalog translator will be usable as a separate component, this would be super useful for me.

In general, this sounds like a lot of things done right. It sounds VERY close to just what I wish existed.

I guess I understand the choice of Postgres since this seems to be primarily focused on being SaaS. It might not matter much when the backend is Clojure anyway, but an embedded database like SQLite might make it a little simpler to deploy locally.

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?

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!

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.

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.

Conflict resolution for real time simultaneous updates, how do you resolve them? I use a CRDT for solving precisely this problem but seems like most multiplayer database services don't actually handle this correctly, using last write wins instead.

Congratulations on this launch. Stepan and his cofounder have been working on this for years and great to see it being launched finally. I should be building something fun with this.

Sending you guys lots of love and best of luck!

I'm currently working on an app that needs offline support, and I wish I had something like this when I started.

One of our requirements though is to be able to completely host in our own infrastructure. I know this is open source, but it would be nice if there was a simple path to self hosting.

Maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't using the most popular open source framework + most popular open source database be a much better fit as there's much more training data and you don't lock yourself into yet another framework?

I'd just go with Rails + Postgres and have all the documentation and options open to me.

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).

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?

Sounds backward to me - why would you need a backend for AI coded apps - if you create a new backend - you also have to 'teach' the LLM how to use it - how do you imagine doing that ?

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

Congrats on the 1.0 milestone!

I had a Show HN that built with Instant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44247029 The common request from that thread was to add guest auth, and few months later Instant had it baked in, so it was really easy to add that feature. Great dev experience :)

Do we really have no way to build this in a single programming language and base database?

IndexDB, Postgres, Javascript, Typescript, Clojure. Not bad, but not much more attractive than the usual technology zoo any startup seems to end up with.

This is basically a fancy Pocketbase / Supabase?

Nice launch! It reminds me a lot RootCX (https://github.com/RootCX/RootCX)

No e2e encryption and no p2p is a deal breaker for me.

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?

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?

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?

Man, its hard not to have a reaction to another BaaS. Every "pricing" page really goes to show that engineering took a backseat to rent-seeking.

There is an incentive to take advantage of users ignorance rather than instruct them. There is no incentive to make self-hosting easy or secure or sustainable.

This is literally $600/month for 250GB of storage with no SLA. Cool "value add" bro.

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.

Any example more complex in the backend?

Are we supposed to expose all entities and relationships and rely on row level security?

Wow, the demo-in-a-blogpost is really impressive.

Looks very nice! I'll give it a spin for prototypes.

Would love to check out /docs but it's currently a 404.

Wait, why is this needed at all? Why is this backend AI specific?

Your Claude Code or Codex is already an expert in all existing backends and databases, we don't need a new backend for AI.

You can literally ask Claude to pick whatever backend it thinks it best, and it will build, deploy, and work fine and be significantly cheaper than Instant 1.0.

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

Congrats, Instant team. Genuinely happy for y'all.

What's the difference between Instant and Convex?

This like many other attempts at this type of thing don’t understand the in distribution vs out of distribution aspect of ml models. Using something the model has the most training on will have the best outcomes. A new handcrafted programming language will perform significantly worse than a poorly thought out programming language that is widely used. Everything is going to revert to the mean as llms continue to progress.

Can i selfhost?

Seems like a supabase competitor?

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?

how is this better than vercel?

congrats!

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