Is the Parse SDK worth it? (cost-effective?) [closed]

As someone who has looked into this before, to see if its "worth it" it depends on a few things. And i have a few questions followed by some answers if these are your cases.

Does your app cost?If not then look at how you are going to make the money, will you cover the expenses? I Imagine even with advertising only on a free app you will be making enough money to cover the expenses. If you start to have "too many" requests.. that's a GOOD thing! it means you have a lot of users or active users which in an advertising sense, is good. Or even in a paid app sense.

Does your app have a bunch of requests operations? For example, in my app we have a chat system, obviously that's going to be a heavy load on requests. Take that into consideration

Are you in a hurry to develop?If your in a hurry, obviously go with Parse, they handle a lot of great things for you and is a really amazing product. fast secure and reliable.

So if you're in a hurry, and are expecting users. Then go for it! Even if you don't get users, you can always go with Parse Free and when you reach your limits with Parse Free, you should have enough users to start paying and upgrading your services.

Also, paying for server maintenance is no joke. The only reason we do not use parse, is because of the fact that we like to have control. And even Parse is giving you more and more control each release.

Once Push Notifications have been implemented and are being used, there's really no maintenance after that.

In a nutshell, yes. Parse allows developers with little to no infrastructure to execute on an idea without the need to pre-purchase hardware in anticipation of traffic or scale overnight if an idea goes viral.

Another way to look at it is - Would you rather focus on the app/idea or the backend infrastructure along with maintenance? Personally I almost consider the $199 the cost of doing business so to speak and allowing me to focus on implementing new features.

Ads and donations will help make a dent but it's the ease of upgrade where they are most beneficial. Updating your own personal hosting can be anything but easy if your app gains critical mass overnight.

PS - Check out their docs for some quick ways to implement things such as log in pages: Parse Login and Signup Views

Reference: I've used Parse with some indie projects and in an enterprise setting.