Strapi is wonderful! But, for small projects, it is a bit expensive to host (in Render.com, is 7$/month for the database + 7$/month for the webservice).
So, I thought about using Supabase’s Rest API (because it’s free) and connect it somehow to Strapi (so I don’t have to host it in a web server for 7$/month).
Is this possible and is it a good idea?
Yes, you can use Supabase. You can find the database connection details provided and it would connect just like any other database.
Note: usually, we have the db running within the same server as the application or within a private network. This is to block public access to the database which delegates all security measures to the application server. In this case, your db connection to Supabase will happen over the www… which is a weak link for your application. Before you even start development, I suggest you configure SSL for the db access to local, prod and any other environment. enabling SSL will cause a bit of latency but in terms of security, this is the best available means to safe-guard your application against various attacks.
Please do share your experience once you have the system up and running… all the best!
This is how things are going:
I created a Vue app, a Strapi project and a Supabase account. Locally, I connected Strapi to Supabase and almost everything is working fine.
Then, I deployed the Vue app and the Strapi project to Vercel.
In the case of Strapi, I set the /build folder to be the output directory. The problem is index.html is looking for an /admin folder, which doesn’t exist.
Do you know how to fix this?
Vercel may not be the right place for strapi since it needs a node environment for its runtime… It does have to do some stuff like hitting endpoint, business logic in APIs, serving data to the admin UI / app-ui and writing data back to the db etc. etc.,
Supabase eliminates the db cost… you still need a web-server to host strapi… You can go for the AWS free tier which gives 12-month free micro ec2 instance (256mb linux) which would be sufficient for running a relatively simple low load strapi app / api
Thank you.
That’s what I was worrying 
My problem is that I want to make many simple Strapi projects. And it would be a little bit expensive, for now.
Thanks anyway.
If they are light-weight apps in terms of read/write and traffic, you could try:
(1) AWS, they have a generous ec2 offering in free-tier for new customers for a 12-month period…
(2) some shared hosting providers support nodejs which could work out budget-friendly
(3) If you look past the branded VPS providers, you can get a decent VPS box for less than $3.5 a month that would be capable of running a few light-weight strapi apps easily
Hope this helps . . . Good luck!
You can also host Strapi on AWS EC2 t4g.small instance with 2gig RAM and 2CPUs. It’s free Amazon EC2 T4g Instances - Amazon Web Services
