The idea was that RLS (Row-level security) would be enabled on any tables exposed to the data API, and RLS was “heavily encouraged” to be turned on by default in the dashboard, and RLS was on by default since at least 2025. Tables require explicit RLS policies to be accessible by the data API, so by default it’s not open like that anymore.

In practice it’s an absolutely stupid design. If you create tables without using their dashboard, like with an ORM or with SQL directly, it’s incredibly easy to have them not use RLS and be wide open to the public.

Taking a step back, the whole “query the database straight from the frontend” is a terrible design in general. For example, they still don’t offer rate limiting! Even if the tables data is secured, there’s nothing stopping someone from hammering the database directly with reads/writes until it overloads it, as there’s no application level rate limiting in the middle. Bonkers.