Facebook bought Parse backend for third-party mobile apps

Facebook today has officially become a paid cloud service provider for mobile app developers. The social network allegedly bought for $ 85 million the startup Parse, which is developing a cloud-based backend for mobile applications (mBaaS: mobile-backend-as-a-service). The deal was officially announced today on the Parse blog and on Facebook .

Parse was founded in 2011 and received start-up capital from Y Combinator. Parse cloud platform was already considered in detail on Habré. In short, it offers mobile developers the services of a remote service for storing and processing data, a kind of Heroku analogue in the mobile market. Mobile developers do not need to raise their servers to process transactions from mobile devices of millions of users, they do not need to store user data themselves, process authentication calls, send push notifications, etc. All this is done in the Parse cloud.

Today, over 60 thousand mobile applications work through the Parse backend on free and paid terms. Any application can receive up to 1 million requests or push notifications per month with a limit of 20 per second.

It is likely that after moving to Facebook data centers, the quality of service will increase. Previously, the company planned the limit so that a paid subscription covers 10% of users who use the service most intensively. The cheapest fare at Parse is $ 199 a month.

This deal indicates that Facebook is strengthening its position in the mobile application market, where it is still significantly inferior to competitors. The Parse backend will now become part of the Facebook Platform.

Parse startup co-founder and CEO Ilya Sukhar said they agreed to offer Facebook among several other options because Facebook's culture is better suited to Parse. Probably, it refers to the "hacker" culture, which is cultivated on Facebook.