TogetherJS + Firebase

Cool hack, Anant!

You definitely don't have the use Firebase. Mozilla even has their own Hub Sever you can use, or you can host your own.

Firebase makes your life easier. It's up to you if you choose to use it.

You're highly entitled to your opinion. However, you can't blame them for wanting to jump on the latest bandwagon and promoting their service. It's obviously working for them. And you have to think that services like this do have an audience.

I prefer to roll my own backend too. I still like seeing a startup being inventive with their marketing. Unlike most startups I've seen, they're at least willing to put more effort in to promoting their service beyond a simple top 10 list or one off tutorial.

Agreed. With all the cloud hosting platforms like Heroku, running one's own backend on these services is quite simple and low maintenance. Firebase may be useful for quickly prototyping something at a hackathon, but that's where I'd leave it.

[TogetherJS Team Member Here] Our hope is for people to find easy, early success with TogetherJS. Hosting a service is still a relatively difficult thing to do, full of potential pitfalls and costs including SSL certs, etc. We want to steer first-time implementors down the simplest path. That being said, we're happy--no, ecstatic--for those who feel the need to host the hub themselves to do so.

Long term, we'd actually like to do away with the Hub server altogether, and rely instead on the WebRTC DataChannel API. Decentralizing this communication would bring countless benefits to the project, including lower hosting costs and much better end-user privacy implications.

Might I recommend http://tent.io as an alternative? I don't have any affiliation with the project. I just think it's the brightest option I've seen for the future of the consumer cloud. It's basically a cloud backend protocol that allows the customer to pick their own tent host that acts as a data store for content they create at sites that use it for a backend. They can even host their own tent. The point is that it gives the user power over where their content is actually stored, with the benefit of centralizing content from disparate apps.

[Firebase CoFounder] I'm sorry to hear you've had a bad experience. Regarding 2 & 3 - you're likely seeing interruptions due to new code deploys. We try to balance moving fast and deploying at off-peak times. Rolling deploys are coming soon and will fix this.

Regarding 1 - We only started charging a month ago.

I'm sorry you've had a bad experience with our integration software (I'm assuming you're referring to our Angular binding?) Angular is changing frequently, we work closely with the team at Google and try to keep up as fast as we can.