Electric

Electric isn't for everyone. If you're a solo dev prototyping a simple app, the learning curve around Shapes and Durable Streams might be more than you need. But if you're building a product where thousands of users need live data without you footing a huge egress bill, Electric's pricing model is genuinely refreshing. You pay for writes, not reads—so scaling to millions of readers doesn't blow up your infra costs. We'd reach for Electric when we're building local-first collaborative tools or agent loops that need resumable state. The fact that Durable Streams are addressable over plain HTTP makes them a natural fit for web clients, and the Yjs integration means real-time collaboration is straightforward. For agent workloads, Electric Agents gives you a runtime that handles state persistence, so you can focus on the agent logic. Where it bites: you're working with lower-level primitives, not a turnkey backend. You'll need to understand Shapes, which control what data syncs where, and you'll likely need to handle auth yourself since Electric doesn't provide built-in auth. It's a toolkit, not a magic bullet. Compared to something like Supabase, which gives you a full auth + database + realtime bundle, Electric is more focused. Supabase is easier to start with, but its realtime features can get pricey at scale. Electric's write-only pricing model is a differentiator, especially if you anticipate high read volumes. However, Supabase might be a better fit if you need integrated auth and a more opinionated workflow. The Databricks acquisition is interesting. It means Electric now has serious enterprise backing, which could accelerate development and support. But it also raises questions about long-term independence. For now, the open-source core remains Apache 2.0, so