Where we come from
We're not new to this. Before Rebase, we built FireCMS — an open-source CMS for Firebase that's been used in over 10,000 projects worldwide, trusted by teams at companies like Microsoft and IKEA. We spent years learning what developers actually need from an admin panel, what content editors struggle with, and where every CMS eventually breaks down.
FireCMS taught us a lot. It taught us that developers want flexibility, not lock-in. That end users want beauty and simplicity, not a wall of forms. That the best tools disappear into the background and let people focus on their actual work.
But FireCMS was tied to Firebase. And as we watched the industry move toward Postgres, toward open standards, toward data sovereignty — we knew it was time to build something bigger. Something that could be the foundation for any digital project, not just those on one cloud provider.
The problem we keep seeing
Every new project starts the same way. You need a database. You need an admin panel. You need authentication, an API layer, file storage, permissions. You've built all of this before — maybe dozens of times. And yet, every time, you start from scratch or lock yourself into a platform that owns your data and your roadmap.
The cloud platforms made it easy. Firebase, Supabase, the managed CMS tools — they let you skip the plumbing and get to building. But ease came with a price: vendor lock-in, opaque pricing, data you can't fully control, and an architecture you can't truly own.
On the other side, self-hosted tools exist, but they often feel like a different era. They're hard to set up, painful to customize, and designed for a world before AI, before TypeScript-everywhere, before developers expected tools to just work.
What we believe
Authorization belongs in the database
This is the belief we bet the architecture on, and the one most likely to start an argument. Access rules that live in application code are rules a forgotten endpoint, a background job, a migration script or a direct SQL console can walk straight past — they protect the door, not the room. In Rebase, authorization is Postgres row-level security: written in TypeScript, compiled to real policies, enforced by the database itself on every statement and every caller. A table with no policy isn't served at all. We fail closed even when that's inconvenient, even when your very first query comes back empty and you have to go write a rule before you can continue. Every other model we've shipped eventually leaked. This one cannot.
Your database is your truth
We don't create shadow databases. We don't hide your schema behind a proprietary layer, and we won't ask you to model your data twice. Rebase connects to your Postgres, reads your tables, and builds on what's already there — so what you see in psql is what the API serves. And if you delete Rebase tomorrow, your data is exactly where you left it, in a shape you can still use. A backend you can't walk away from isn't infrastructure, it's a hostage arrangement.
Agents are users of your backend, not a feature bolted onto it
A large and growing share of the code written against your backend is now written by an agent — and agents don't read dashboards. They read schemas, types, and error messages. So Rebase ships an MCP server, machine-readable collection definitions, a generated typed SDK and scoped API keys, and we treat a confusing error as a bug whether the reader is a person or a model. Tools designed solely for a human clicking through a console are already being worked around rather than used.
Open source is a foundation, not a feature
Rebase is MIT — every package, every line. Not open-core with the useful half behind a licence key. Not source-available with a clause about who may compete with us. We've watched too many infrastructure projects use "open source" as a funnel and then relicense once the community had done its part, and we know exactly how that felt from the outside. The licence is the promise, and MIT is the only version of that promise we couldn't quietly take back later.
Europe should own its infrastructure
We build from Madrid, and we think the current arrangement — where most European companies run their data on infrastructure owned elsewhere and governed by someone else's law — is a strategic mistake worth undoing. Data sovereignty and GDPR aren't a compliance checkbox on our roadmap; they're the reason several design decisions here went the harder way. You can run Rebase anywhere on earth and we'd be glad if you did. But we aren't neutral about this one.
Who is Rebase for
Rebase is for anyone who's tired of choosing between ease-of-use and ownership:
- The developer who wants Firebase-like speed without Firebase-like lock-in
- The startup that needs to move fast today and scale tomorrow — without re-platforming
- The agency that's tired of rebuilding the same admin panel for every client project
- The enterprise team that needs to keep data on their own infrastructure, with full audit trails
Rebase is highly modular — use the admin panel, the API layer, the SDK, or the full platform. Take only the parts you need, leave the rest. You decide how much of the stack you adopt.
Built for three worlds
Most tools are designed for one audience. We're building for three — because we believe the best platform is one where everyone can work effectively:
End Users
Beautiful, intuitive interfaces that non-technical people actually enjoy using.
Developers
TypeScript-native, React-extensible, with APIs and SDKs that feel like they were made for you.
AI Agents
MCP server, structured APIs, and machine-readable schemas — so agents can build with Rebase too.
Our promise
We're not building Rebase to flip it or to lock you in. We're building it because we've spent our careers making developer tools, and we know this is what's missing: an open, beautiful, Postgres-native platform that respects your data, your time, and your intelligence.
We ship fast, and we ship in public — the changelog and the issue tracker are the record. Rebase is early. Early enough that the beliefs above are still the whole product, and early enough that an argument you make can still change one of them. That's the best moment to show up.
If any of this resonates with you — if you've felt the same frustration, if you believe the same things — come build with us.
The Rebase Team
Madrid · Building open-source developer tools since 2020
