Hands-on AngularJS with Backlift part 2: Wiring up a back-end API

Hi Randall. Thanks for the question. I get asked this a lot. For others that have been waiting to learn more about our future plans before committing to Backlift, thanks for your patience.

We do want developers to stay with us beyond the prototyping phase. I started off building Backlift Data to handle real world application needs like auth, access controls, validation and security. Now that it's in the wild I regularly get requests for features, and we're working quickly to implement those features and expand the circle of applications that Backlift supports. We're lucky that other services like Parse and Kinvey have paved the way, demonstrating that you can ship real products, and build a business, using a BAAS.

But our goal is not to be another Parse. Backlift Data is just one part of Backlift. We see Backlift as a deployment platform primarily, and our goal is to make building client-side apps easier and faster for the majority of developers. And by majority I mean consultants, designers, marketers and students that know HTML, CSS and some Javascript.

Here are some things we're doing to achieve that goal:

1) Limiting the scope of the platform. We don't want your front-end code to be backlift code. You should be able to move off backlift, and onto your own backend by changing a few API URLs. This is hard to do in practice, and many of our performance and workflow features (like our {{$variant}} tag and {{$prefetch}} tag, which we'll announce soon) are backlift specific. But Backlift should not be required for the core functionality of your app.

2) Making migration easier. We currently allow data export and we do want to provide app export functionality so that developers can move onto a different host. Right now we're still working out the best way to accomplish this.

3) Making integration easier. We're working on APIs that will let you tie in other data services easily, such as a proxy API that eliminates much of the pain of CORS and connects your front-end logic to external APIs.

4) Making sharing easier. Right now you can embed a button that will let others launch a new backlift app, based on your template, with a click. We intend to expand on this feature to make it easier to upload and share code, and even make your templates available for a fee.

As for pricing, I hear you. Here's our current plan, but please bear with us because pricing is likely to change. First off, anyone can currently create unlimited free apps on Backlift with temporary randomized URLs. Those URLs are renewable every 14 days. We think this is a good way to offer a sandbox for developers that want to try out different libraries and learn. We also think this provides sufficient obscurity so that backlift apps can be developed in private. When a developer is ready to launch an app publicly, we think there should be an affordable plan, priced to compete with shared hosting options currently on the market. On the other hand if a developer is building several apps, or needs to scale up, we believe they should move to a business plan. So just to put some numbers in here, we're thinking less than $30 per month for the personal tier and closer to $200 per month for the business tier, but again, the specifics will change.

I hope this answers some of your questions. Happy to answer more here or at cole at backlift.com.

We do currently support custom domains. What did you see that makes you think otherwise?