One shovel, not the whole hardware store.
Shovelbase is built for the apps you make for yourself and the people around you — the tool five people on your team use every day, the thing you built because it didn't exist. The others are sized and priced for production from day one, so you pay for scale your app will never use.
| shovelbase | Firebase | Supabase | AWS | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Right-sized for | One user, or a few | Scaling to millions | Scaling to millions | Any scale, forever |
| Price | Budget friendly | Grows with usage | Per project | Per service |
| Time to launch | Minutes | Hours | Hours | Days |
| Complexity | Just the essentials | A full platform | A full platform | The whole cloud |
| Full stack in one | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Piece by piece |
| Ready to share | URL + sign-in included | ✓ | ~ | Piece by piece |
Where shovelbase stands alone.
An isolated instance with just the essentials — enough to learn if the idea is worth building. No standing up production-scale infrastructure, and paying to keep it running, before you've proven a thing.
The people you built it for get a link and a login — not a repo to clone or a build to run. Every project is live at its own address with sign-in already wired.
Your AI drives the whole platform from the CLI — no dashboard to click through, no cloud services to wire together by hand.
Logs, analytics, and feature flags come built in — so you can put the idea in front of real users and see if it works, not just ship it.