How Poke Gives Every User Their Own Database, Without Them Ever Knowing

Poke, an iMessage-based personal assistant that can generate fully functional websites from text prompts, uses Turso to automatically provision a separate serverless database for each site it creates. The per-database design was chosen over a shared database model to isolate performance problems, limit security risks from user-generated code, and avoid paying for always-on capacity for inactive projects. When Poke builds a site, an AI agent creates the application and schema in a virtual machine, deploys the site to Vercel, and stores the new Turso database connection as a deployment environment variable, making the process invisible to users. This infrastructure supports features such as authentication, stored RSVPs, real-time multiplayer whiteboards, and browser games, while allowing users to update sites through additional messages. Poke evaluated alternatives including Neon, Supabase, Cloudflare, and PlanetScale, but selected Turso for its self-service provisioning, isolation model, and serverless pricing. After processing about 100 million messages in three months and creating roughly 10,000 databases, Poke has not yet needed to remove inactive databases, and it expects Turso to remain its default database platform for future user-generated projects.

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