Petitioning Facebook: Don't Shut Down Parse.com

If you base your company technically on something you cannot swap out then you need to calculate in the risk that you vanish before your time has come. Which is why, bad Chef code aside, Walmart (https://github.com/walmartlabs) is a big company and knew to write a common denominator over cloud hosters to make sure this doesn't happen to them. If you picked Parse (but of course also Firebase and whatever else that is only cloud based or too expensive to ever run on premise) to base your company on, you have an x% chance of being destroyed overnight. That x changes and it is your job as a business owner to keep re-evaluating that x and keep it close to 0 where your resources allow it.

This makes me sad. I understand where people are coming from, but at this point people should realize that you cant build business on someone else's free products. Its for a reason that big companies pay money to get, sometimes even open source software (Red Hat) or get certified machines (from Dell/HP).

Building a business/livelihood is very different from experimenting. Experiment all you want with free products, but if you're gonna do the former be very sure of what the risks are.

I feel like everything that's going down or changing now has a freaking petition to keep it as-is. What if it simply isn't profitable for them to keep it up? Would all these petitioning be willing to pay 10-100 what they are now paying for the service just to keep it alive? What makes this so unique? Why doesn't someone just build something similar?

I agree, this petition has no chance of changing Facebook's plan. At the very most it would only be useful for proving that lots of developers depend on Parse and maybe to form some of those developers into a community that might want to build a new Parse-compatible service.

Really? That's not how business works.

better: avoid corporate services for your app.