Exploring Convex in 2025: A First Look

Convex is a backend-as-a-service (BaaS) platform. I recently spent some time exploring it. This blog post summarizes what I’ve learned so far.

Disclaimer: I haven’t used Convex in any long-term projects. These are just my early impressions based on public content. I may update my views as I gain more hands-on experience.

TLDR

Convex is excellent for MVPs and hobby projects. But I’m not yet confident enough to use it for long-term and critical projects.

What Convex Does Well

Convex stands out in a few areas:

  • Complete TypeScript safety from end to end
  • Real-time data sync
  • A full-stack solution that can replace other tools like tRPC, Kysely, Zod, and Tanstack React Query

I’ve only briefly touched on Convex’s strengths, but trust me, these advantages are truly excellent. I haven’t written much because you can find plenty of information about Convex’s benefits, whether in Convex’s documentation, YouTube channels, and so on.

Where I’m Concerned

1. Pricing Model

Convex charges per developer. I don’t like to pay extra fees simply because I have a new intern joining the team.

2. SLA

Both Firebase and Supabase provide SLA commitments with compensation plans (Firebase Firestore: 99.95%, Supabase: 99.9%).

Convex only offers a 99.99% SLA target (🤨), not a guaranteed SLA. This suggests that Convex may not yet be fully mature as a cloud provider.

3. Regional Availability

Firebase and Supabase support deployment in different regions like Europe and Asia。

Convex currently (2025 June) puts everything in us-east-1.

This may be a blocker for projects with regulatory or latency requirements, and don’t want to self-host (more on this later).

4. Authentication

Convex doesn’t have built-in user management like Firebase or Supabase.

They offer a beta auth library that lets you build user tables and login flows, but it only supports client-side React and React Native for now.

5. Self-hosting scalability

In 2024, Convex open-sourced its backend engine. You can now self-host it if you don’t want to rely on their cloud service or need a non-US deployment. It’s a fantastic move compared to Firebase, and it reduces the risk of vendor lock-in.

However, the open-source backend only runs on a single machine, which has limited scalability. You’ll need to modify the open-source code to scale.

Conclusion

Convex is a great tool, if your project fits into this narrow sweet spot:

  • You’re using TypeScript (e.g. no Swift/Kotlin)
  • You’re using React (e.g. Their svelte binding is still in v0.0.11)
  • You’re ok deploying to a US or you’re ok with self-hosting
  • Your user base is not too large

If you stay within this zone, Convex provides a great developer experience. I mean really, really great. You can ship products faster and with fewer tools to manage.

Replacing Convex in a large project would mean rewriting nearly everything. So using it is a big commitment. It has potential, but as a platform launched in 2022, I’d like to see a few more years of stable success before fully trusting it for serious work.