Used For

• +**Your Firebase bill hit $200/month for a simple app** → PocketBase runs on a $5 VPS with no usage limits or surprise charges
• +**Building auth, file uploads, and real-time features from scratch is eating your weekends** → Everything's built-in, working backend in 30 minutes
• +**Your startup needs to move fast but can't afford enterprise backend costs** → Complete backend infrastructure without hiring DevOps engineers
• +Single executable deployment - download one file, run it, you're done
• +Real-time subscriptions work out of the box - no WebSocket infrastructure to build

Best For

• >Side project stuck at 60% done - boilerplate code after work is soul-crushing
• >Hit your Firebase bill limit and your app went offline
• >You want full control over your data without vendor lock-in drama

Not For

• -Enterprise teams needing horizontal scaling across multiple servers — this only scales vertically on one machine
• -Anyone wanting zero operational burden — you're responsible for backups, updates, and server maintenance
• -High-traffic apps with lots of simultaneous writes — SQLite hits performance walls that PostgreSQL doesn't

Pairs With

• *React/Vue/Svelte (your frontend that connects via the JavaScript SDK)
• *DigitalOcean/AWS (where you actually host it since it's self-hosted only)
• *Cloudflare (for CDN and DDoS protection since you're managing infrastructure now)
• *GitHub Actions (to automate deployments because manual uploads get old fast)
• *AWS S3 (for file storage and database backups since local storage isn't bulletproof)

The Catch

• !You're trading Firebase's convenience for server babysitting — backups, security patches, and monitoring are now your job
• !It's pre-1.0 software, so breaking changes could hit your production app
• !Complex queries require writing Go code — the REST API only handles basic filtering

Bottom Line

Firebase for people who want to own their data and pay $5/month for hosting instead of $500.