Firebase provides many services (hosting, database, authentication, serverless functions, analytics, file storage, feature flags, and more) in a "pay-for-what-you-use" format with free allocations during development while Svelte Kit provides a good deal of functionality for the front-end.
Motivation
After a few years of working on projects, there is an overhead that comes with using many services. After considering AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure, Firebase (mostly supported by Google Cloud now) covers most services needed to launch an app with minimal upfront cost.
Having used NextJS and React for a few years I kept running into "friction". After trying Svelte [Kit] for a few weeks I've decided to give it a go as some of the things seem to run simpler.
Concerns/Trade-offs
In the long term, the cost of scaling Firebase may increase significantly. Some of those costs may be designed away or there may be an eventual need to move to a different system. For now, the simplicity of use and lower startup cost seem to warrant that trade-off vs setting up more complex systems.
As for Svelte Kit I have significantly less experience than with NextJS+React which means that I am more likely to run into problems that I have not had to solve before. The framework is still evolving and by deciding to use their latest (unreleased as of this writing) version 5 there is less information available when it comes to troubleshooting issues.
Top comments (1)
A few years ago (2021) I started a project using svelte/vite/tailwind/firebase. At first I was very productive since I had an armed database, realtime and authentication at hand with a few simple configurations, but as it continued to grow I had to resort to strategies to make firebase/firestore scalable which led me to "replicate" the behavior of sql with firestore which considerably increased the database reads since I did not want to have data duplication, for that reason I decided to migrate to supabase looking for an alternative that was just as simple and productive but that kept costs at bay and in which I had more control.