Why I Built Tealbase

It was 3:14 AM on a Tuesday. My phone vibrated off the nightstand, hitting the floor with a thud.

PagerDuty. Again.

Our app had just hit the front page of Hacker News. Traffic was vertical. The user count was climbing like a mountaineer on speed. This was the moment every founder dreams of—the "Hockey Stick" graph.

But I wasn't celebrating. I was staring at a glowing monitor in the dark, watching our infrastructure melt.

Our Firebase instance was choking. The bill had just crossed four figures for the day. And the worst part? I couldn't optimize it. I couldn't write a raw SQL query to fix the bottleneck because I didn't have SQL. I had a JSON tree and a prayer.

I realized then that I wasn't scaling a startup. I was trapped in a Success Disaster.

The Golden Handcuffs

Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) platforms like Firebase are like All-Inclusive Resorts.

They are beautiful when you first arrive. You check in, and everything is handled. Authentication? Done. Database? Managed. Realtime sync? Magic. You feel like a genius because you shipped a product in a weekend.

But as you scale, the resort changes.

You want to cook your own specific meal? Sorry, guests aren't allowed in the kitchen. You want to knock down a wall to make room for more people? Strictly prohibited.

Suddenly, the resort isn't a vacation. It's a Luxury Prison. You are locked into their pricing, their limited query patterns, and their proprietary vendor logic. To escape, you have to rewrite everything from scratch.

I built Tealbase because I wanted the room service of the resort, but the Freedom of Ownership.

The "Are We There Yet?" Problem

The hardest part of leaving the "Resort" is losing the Realtime Magic. Standard databases like Postgres are passive. They are like Libraries.

A Library is full of knowledge, but it is silent. It waits for you to ask a question. “Hey, do we have new messages?” “No.” “How about now?” “No.”

This is Polling. It is the computational equivalent of a child in the backseat screaming "Are we there yet?" every three seconds. It wastes energy, it floods your network, and it destroys your database performance.

The Solution: WAL Listening

We didn't want to build a new database. We wanted to give Postgres a voice.

Tealbase hooks into the Write-Ahead Log (WAL).

If the database is the brain, the WAL is the Heartbeat. It is the raw, binary pulse of every single transaction that happens inside the engine. Every INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE creates a pulse in the log.

Tealbase acts as a Stethoscope.

// The "Stethoscope" Logic (Simplified)
func ListenToWal(slotName string) {
    conn := ConnectToPostgres()

    // We don't query tables. We listen to the binary stream.
    replicationSlot := conn.StartReplication(slotName)

    for pulse := range replicationSlot.Stream() {
        // A row changed!
        // Broadcast this instantly to 10,000 waiting users.
        BroadcastToWebSockets(pulse)
    }
}

By tapping into this heartbeat, we get realtime events for free.

We don't ask the database for updates. The database tells us when it changes.

This turns Postgres from a silent Library into a broadcasting Radio Station. Your frontend subscribes to a "frequency" (a query), and whenever data changes, the music plays instantly.

The Best of Both Worlds

Tealbase allows a single $5 DigitalOcean droplet to handle 10,000 concurrent connections, because the Go server is just a thin fiber-optic cable connecting the database's heartbeat to the user's screen.

You get the Developer Experience of the Resort (Realtime, Auth, APIs). But you keep the Ownership of the House (Raw Postgres, SQL, No Lock-in).

Simple. Deterministic. Yours.