Thanks Josh! Of course I'm using many other services other than Firebase. But Firebase even on 2026, I feel it still does what is suppose to do well. It does have many gaps tho, but tons of small projects or for beginners where it's really easy to get started with Firebase.

And surprisingly, there are still many large scale mobile app and webapps that's running on Firebase. For most of them, the local development without costing them, depends on this local emulators suite.

Compare to the alternatives like Supabase, where the team are really focused on giving best dev exps, for some reason Firebase local development has been the same for a long time.

I personally thought, giving that best dev exps locally for Firebase, could give devs a fresh of breath air for maintaining or developing new projects faster.

Firestore's subcollection feature is pretty cool. As far as NoSQL dbs go, it's flexible query and indexing make it more suitable to app development than, say, DynamoDB.

To me, the lack of good developer tooling has been what holds it back. Not having a maintained type-safe querying ORM/ODM library like eg. Prisma or Mongoose is a major flaw imo (not to mention missing out on the coolest firestorm)

Sharing my perspective as a big time user of Firebase:

1. It is practically free for a lot of my projects. Yes, there are also other free platforms out there now, but because Firebase is largely an abstraction on GCP, I have more reach if I need to scale it or move it into a more capable backend that I have full control over (very natural progression from Firebase -> Cloud Run -> GKE Autopilot -> GKE). For a few use cases, I do pay (e.g. keep a warm Function for an auth flow).

2. Firebase auth is still really, really good. It is super easy to get SSO working with Firebase auth. End of the day, it is largely (entirely?) just an abstraction on top of Google OAuth API, but it is by far the easiest and most foolproof of the solutions on Azure, AWS. And again, for most use cases, it is entirely free.

3. A well-designed Firestore backend is for all intents and purposes free for side projects and can still scale without the need to overthink it. I have had a few projects that had big Reddit spikes and Firestore just swallows the volume like a champ (that would have swamped a small Pg instance). I have run several side projects, blogs, etc. for years purely on Firebase because Firestore's free tier is really, really generous and when you pass those limits, the pricing is still reasonable. Ridiculously generous.

4. Firestore gives you real-time websockets with no additional infra needed and again, practically free for most side projects. Cloudflare now has PartyKit which fills the same niche, but Firestore's real-time subscriptions are nice because of how integrated they are into the backing store. Amplify's AppSync (when I used it last) was janky AF; did not like it at all and did not like the fake relational abstraction over DynamoDB (dangerous at scale). Azure SignalR, Web PubSub, and Fluid Relay are not free or they are not usable at the free tier beyond initial sandboxing.

5. It is easy to operate. If you want to run directly on a hyperscaler cloud (AWS, Google, Azure), Firebase is the best tooling. Azure doesn't really have an equivalent. AWS killed off their Copilot CLI[0] which I felt like was approaching the utility of Firebase and not a fan of Amplify (which seems to have changed direction recently). I was a fanboy of CosmosDB, but Microsoft refused to ship a working ARM64 emulator version for YEARS[1] which made it unusable on Mac. I am comfortable operating at any layer of any of AWS, Azure, GCP, but most of the time I only want to when I need to. So Firebase lets me ship something fast, but drop down into the underlying cloud infra when I need to.

6. Until recently, the other platforms did not have great options for emulation. I think AI has changed that and now we are seeing more proliferation of platform emulators. LocalStack, for example, had already locked some of their emulation behind paid licenses. Firebase emulators were pretty complete in terms of what was needed to build and ship an app end to end. The OAuth emulator is still really, really nice.

[0] https://aws.github.io/copilot-cli/ : literally their best infrastructure tooling and they killed it....................

[1] https://github.com/Azure/azure-cosmos-db-emulator-docker/iss...

This post also begs the question:

Why didnt you simply provision more powerful developer boxes to handle the needs of the Firebase emulator?

If runtime performance is the moat then won’t Google simply improve on these regressions using their decades of cloud database expertise with projects like Google Spanner?

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These are hardball questions and I feel a bit bad asking them, but I believe asking hard questions is kinder than blind adulation and support.