How ichibase works

Every project is its own little backend: a database, end-user auth, file storage, realtime, and edge functions — all behind a single domain. This page maps the pieces so you know what you get and where each request goes.

What you get per project

When you create a project you get a complete backend, no servers to manage:

• Database — Postgres or MongoDB, chosen when you create the project. (Paid plans can have both.)
• Auth — sign up / sign in your end users, issue JWTs, OAuth providers, password reset and magic links.
• Storage — upload and serve files, with public buckets served straight from a global CDN.
• Realtime — push messages to your users over a WebSocket connection.
• Edge Functions— deploy your own TypeScript that runs close to the data, behind your project's auth.

One project, one domain

A project is isolated infrastructure with a single base URL. Everything routes off that one host:

https://<project>.ichibase.net
├── /postgres/*    REST database API (Postgres projects)
├── /mongo/*       document database API (MongoDB projects)
├── /auth/*        sign up / sign in, tokens, OAuth, password reset
├── /functions/*   your deployed Edge Functions
└── /realtime      WebSocket endpoint for live messages

https://cdn.ichibase.net/<project>/<bucket>/<path>
                  files served from the CDN host

Here is what each path does:

• /postgres/* — the REST database API for Postgres projects. Select, insert, update, delete, and call SQL functions over HTTP. Guarded by row-level security.
• /mongo/* — the document API for MongoDB projects. The same kind of CRUD, plus restricted aggregation, guarded by JSON access rules.
• /auth/* — the auth service. End users authenticate here and receive a JWT that every other endpoint understands.
• /functions/*— your Edge Functions. Each deployed function gets its own route and runs with your project's credentials injected.
• /realtime — the WebSocket endpoint. Clients connect and receive messages addressed to them; they never publish directly.
• Storage CDN host — files are served from a single CDN host, cdn.ichibase.net/<project>/<bucket>/<path>, so reads come from the edge. The reserved public bucket needs no token; every other bucket requires a short-lived signed token per read.

Postgres or MongoDB?

You pick one database flavor when you create a project. They expose different APIs and different security models, so choose by how you want to model and protect your data:

• Postgres — relational tables, SQL, joins, and SQL functions you can call as RPCs. Security is enforced by row-level security (RLS) policies that run inside the database. Pick this for structured, related data and when you want SQL.
• MongoDB — flexible JSON documents and collections. Mongo has no native row-level security, so ichibase puts a gateway in front of it that applies per-collection JSON access rules (with ${auth.uid} interpolation). Pick this for schema-light or document-shaped data.

On the free plan you choose exactly one. On paid plans a project can have both Postgres and MongoDB available at the same time, reachable through /postgres/* and /mongo/* respectively.

Tiers

The same set of capabilities runs on bigger or more machines as you move up. The difference between tiers is isolation, headroom, and a few features:

• Free — your project runs on shared infrastructure alongside other free projects, isolated per project. One project per owner, one database flavor, with hard quotas: a combined database disk budget, an object-storage budget, a handful of concurrent database connections, a short statement timeout, a cap on concurrent realtime connections, and per-invocation limits on functions. Nightly backups with short retention. A free project may sleep after a period of inactivity. Good for prototypes and small apps.
• Pro — a dedicated VPS owned by ichibase, sized to you. Both Postgres and MongoDB available, quotas relaxed to fit the box, larger object-storage budget, and nightly backups plus write-ahead-log archiving with longer retention. Priced as VPS cost plus margin.
• Business — multiple VPSs, horizontally scaled: a Postgres primary with read replicas, a MongoDB replica set, and the app tier replicated behind the router. The largest storage budgets, plus custom domain and SLA options.

The SDK is the easy path

You can call every endpoint above with plain HTTP, but the client SDK wraps all of it — database queries, auth, storage, realtime, and function calls — behind one typed object. Point it at your project URL and anon key and start building:

import { createClient } from '@ichibase/client';

const ichi = createClient(
  'https://<project>.ichibase.net',
  'ich_pub_...', // anon key
);

// One client, all capabilities:
const { data } = await ichi.from('posts').select('*');
const { user } = await ichi.auth.signInWithPassword({ email, password });

From here, see the /docs/quickstart to spin up your first project, the /docs/database guide for querying data, and /docs/auth for signing in your users.