I expect that our business logic would eventually have outgrown rules and cloud functions.
We used algolia to do full text and geo search. It worked, but I expected eventually it'd be really painful to reindex.
Same sort of thing with analytics. Firebase analytics is pretty powerful, but eventually we would want all our data mirrored somewhere we could use regular BI tools.
Then there is cost. We would have to weigh the cost of rewriting against the GCP bill, but at some point I expect it'd make sense.
Take this all with a grain of salt. We didn't get far enough to test any of these assumptions.
You can leverage Postgres full-text search, and GeoJSON/PostGIS support. Also for replacing algolia ElasticSearch comes to mind, that should work for most of those use cases.
For analytics and in the SaaS part you have both mixpanel and segment, and also some nice privacy-aware alternatives to Google analytics like fathom and some other indie startup.
Recently some open source segment alternative came along in HN...
MS PowerBI connects with lots of stuff, although it's paid
ELK is open source
Also metabase is a nice open source tool for BI.
What I was trying to say is that I was anticipating having to write and maintain a bunch of glue between firebase and these tools and maybe eventually outgrowing this glue.
A benefit of using a traditional SQL database is much of this stuff exists already off the shelf.
Maybe Firebase is there or is getting there. It's almost two years since I built something on it.
We used algolia to do full text and geo search. It worked, but I expected eventually it'd be really painful to reindex.
Same sort of thing with analytics. Firebase analytics is pretty powerful, but eventually we would want all our data mirrored somewhere we could use regular BI tools.
Then there is cost. We would have to weigh the cost of rewriting against the GCP bill, but at some point I expect it'd make sense.
Take this all with a grain of salt. We didn't get far enough to test any of these assumptions.