100% agree. Building my first notification-based app right now and Parse seemed like the obvious and best choice. Thing is, after a bit of thinking something felt...off. Not with the service, but off with the idea of attaching this small little project to something so...out of my control.

I dug around the net and found a working solution I could install on my own server, and now that's exactly what I've got: The experience of doing this on my own, the flexibility to grow as needed, and the code to implement again and again without needing anyone or anything else.

Building apps these days is a massive gamble for small guys like me. We often spend dozens of hours with little to no possibility of return.

Any action I can take that reduces stress points and increase my knowledge base, (and this would have been a massive stress point) I'll take.