Parse closes down: Is Backend as a Service profitable?

Parse starting sending messages last week that it would be winding down it’s services. This came as a shock for many people who have come to rely on their services as a way to reduce the complexity of having to maintain, deploy and scale your own backend solution. For those of you who haven’t seen it, you can take a look at the announcement below.

It is clear that Facebook is not joking around and not keeping services and tools that are not as profitable as they need. This is a shock for companies and developers as it demonstrates that in the end trusting your backend to an external system can have nefarious consequences for you. From the moment you don’t control all the variables, the risk of this type of problems always exists.

Parse are going a give a full year until the sun sets on the platform, they are even open sourcing the Parse server (which is build on node.js and requires a Mongo Database). But mind you, self hosting a Parse server is by no means easy and never substitutes the ease of the original Parse panel, so other alternatives like setting up your own APIs and creating your own infrastructure, or another Backend as a Service should be considered.

A few years ago, I published a post named “Is Backend as a Service the new Gold rush?”. In this post I analysed if systems like Parse that made developing Apps with a server side were the new money making scheme of the tech world companies. However, after the Parse announcement, one can’t but help thinking that perhaps it is not such a profitable endeavour.

If you stop to think about it, big companies usually create their own Backends and host them on systems like Amazon Web Services, and those are the ones that pay the big bills. Small developers that use Parse, tend to have the free version (which has a ridiculously high limit usage before it starts charging) or pay very little money.

So, is backend as a service really profitable? Will it become an open source self hosted alternative? Or will companies use this as a launch pad for their new and reinforced Parse alternatives?

Let me know your thoughts!