Parse.com is Dead! Why shutting down parse.com was the greatest thing ever happened to parse.com
With over 600,000 apps using Parse, the shutdown of the service was probably the worst nightmare for startups and medium businesses. And yet, that’s the reality and it actually couldn’t be better! And here is why the death of Parse is actually just the beginning of something much more better.
A bit of history Parse.com was founded as a cloud app platform providing set of client side SDKs for app developers to concetrate on the features of their app rather than coding the boring backend. Being Y-Combinator backed startup parse.com started to get into the market pretty quickly and raised $5.5m in just few months.. Shorty Parse started to become a great tool for app developers. It literally did what it was supposed to do, cut the app development time and cost significantly. They were adding features and making it better day by day. It was a great tool to create an MVP for your product. No wonder it was acquired by facebook in 2013 for $85M and it seemed to be a huge step in development of BAAS platforms and facebook was going to move it to the next level. But the initial problems parse had, never got fixed during the next years. First of all, being a closed service, it had limitations with which developers were not able to do anything but posting on Parse forum. For instance, number modules was very limited, or limit of number of objects you get on each request (1000). Also any app that was built relying on parse was depending on it, meaning that any downtime of Parse was causing problems to the apps.
Well, although parse wasn’t perfect it was still the best BaaS service available on the market without a doubt. So many people loved it.
Surprisingly Facebook announced that they are shutting down Parse by January 28 2017. Everybody went crazy on losing their existing data and having minimal amount of time to find and more importantly, code for an alternative. Luckily, Facebook released Parse as an open source project: Parse Server, which, to be honest, was even a bigger surprise for me. There are not many examples of big corporation open sourcing a huge platform with all its parts.
So what’s now? This is where the magic starts. At the moment, Parse Server Github repository has almost 10k stars and 2k forks. Thousands of developers are pinpointing the issues, discussing ways of optimization and possibilities of adding new modules and features. Isn’t that great?
Practically they made a huge platform open source which you can simply download for free, install on your own server, make specific edits for you and just use it. Besides a huge community, it has a lot of other advantages like cost efficiency or manageability. App owners will sleep better knowing that their app performance only depends on them and not just some company which can shut down any day :) On top of that, any developer will be able to dig in and add any specific features for their own needs.
A better option
Well, there is a better option here! At OffParse we're offering a self hosted parse server and take care of the server administration pain. You just create your app and we do the rest! Feel free to signup today at http://offparse.com and check it out! We're offering a free trial period and a FREE MIGRATION TOOL, to get your app migrated with only 3 clicks.
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