I disagree. If using something like this let's you get to market much faster, much cheaper, and find market fit faster/cheaper, then it's worth it. Depending on the need it can take millions of dollars and year(s) of work to then begin working on the actual business objectives.
Fixes for Parse bugs were usually not forthcoming from the Parse team---and when things were fixed, more often than not the fix was reverted within a week because it caused something even worse.
For the first six months of our time using them, Parse would only report downtime post facto and backdated by a day. “F@#$k Parse” was perhaps the most frequently uttered phrase among all of us in our douchebag Mission district headquarters. What a life.
All the time, push notifications inexplicably stopped working for hours at a time---we were running a daily sales app, and this really killed us. It ruined dozens of auctions and pissed off tons of our users. But what's even worse? Parse made my life a living hell for a year, and I'm glad they're gone.
I never heard people talking about the difficulty of moving off of Parse, especially in mobile clients that were developed with the Parse SDK. I spent a ridiculous amount of time getting Parse synced with our custom backend so old clients wouldn't break.
Final thing: debuggin. For nearly any issue, a half-assed solution---often not usable in production---by one of their staff was buried deep into their forums. Super painful.
> We were also paying Parse an absurd amount of money for extra reliability, which didn't seem to help much.
We were also hooked into the same scam!
> For nearly any issue, a half-assed solution---often not usable in production---by one of their staff was buried deep into their forums. Super painful.
Haha, well put. They always directed people to their pathetic "support forum", where one of their staff would propose a criminally bad "solution" to a problem, which no self-respecting engineer could even sanction putting into production.
A thought: if "Parse" had originally just been this open source Parse Server offering, and you had taken that and plopped it on e.g. Heroku, would that have been a better deal for you? Seems like "apply FOSS to PaaS to get BaaS" wouldn't have been that much more hassle, operations-wise; and you would have been able to upgrade the backend only when you liked, rather than having it mutated out from under you.
So, I would say, if Parse had been this Parse Server product from the start, that would have been a lot better! But there wasn't really any need for such a thing at my company. We had to use Parse for incestuous "YC alum" reasons---we did not have a technical need for it.
i'd love to figure out how to lock people into expensive shitty projects that belong to me
If you do have a project that will take millions of dollars and year(s) of work to get up and running, I'm going to guess you have much bigger problems than what backend you use, and choosing something like Parse won't help you that much.
