About Supavec
Supavec is an open-source retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) service. It lets developers build AI applications that answer questions over their own documents by providing vector search and a chat API, without assembling the embedding and retrieval pipeline themselves. The project presents itself as an open-source alternative to Carbon.ai and offers both a cloud version and code you can run on your own infrastructure.
The README describes a multi-tenant design that uses row-level security for team-level data isolation, usage-based billing on the cloud version, and batched embeddings to reduce OpenAI costs. Retrieval can be tuned with configurable chunk size and overlap, and searches combine a file filter with cosine similarity. Operationally it includes PostHog analytics, request-level tracing with unique IDs, asynchronous usage logging, streaming or standard responses, and Redis-backed rate limiting.
The product is API-first with REST endpoints, documentation at docs.supavec.com and a related Python API repository. A chat interface shows live embedding previews for debugging. It is built with Next.js, Supabase, Tailwind CSS, Bun and Upstash, written in TypeScript, and licensed under Apache-2.0.
Key features
- Vector search and chat API over your documents
- Multi-tenant isolation with row-level security
- Configurable chunk size and overlap
- Streaming or standard API responses
- Request tracing and PostHog analytics
- Redis-backed rate limiting
Good fit for
- →Adding document question answering to an app
- →Building RAG features without managing vector infrastructure
- Tags
- rag
- vector-search
- embeddings
- ai
- api
- nextjs
- supabase
- llm
Supavec: questions and answers
- What is Supavec used for?
- Supavec is an open-source RAG-as-a-service platform that provides vector search and a chat API over your own data, positioned as an alternative to Carbon.ai. It is a good fit for adding document question answering to an app and building RAG features without managing vector infrastructure.
- Is Supavec open source?
- Yes. Supavec is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at supavec/supavec and is written mainly in TypeScript.
- Is Supavec free?
- Yes. Supavec is open source, so the software itself is free to use. A managed cloud version is also available.
- Can I self-host Supavec?
- Yes. Supavec can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
- What is Supavec an alternative to?
- Supavec is an open-source alternative to Vectara. Other open-source alternatives to Vectara include RAGFlow, Trieve and Vespa.
- Is Supavec actively maintained?
- The most recent commit to Supavec was on 28 December 2025. The project has 1.2k stars on GitHub.
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