$250 Free Credit for Parse.com

Graham

Fairly decent offer for Parse.com credit available from Product Hunt until the end of Feb.

$250 free credit for Parse.com services, might be useful for anyone interested in giving them a try:

http://www.producthunt.com/posts/parse-2

http://parse.com/coupon/parselovesproducthunt

Disclosure: nothing to declare, no connection, no affiliate link.

The Corinthian

Looks like the app-out-of-a-box market is finally consolidating.

Graham

The Corinthian wrote: »

Looks like the app-out-of-a-box market is finally consolidating.

If that's true, I don't this it would be before time. There's an awful lot of BaaS and MBaaS operators in the market at the moment and I think it's inevitable that some of them will vanish in the not to distant future.

Hopefully the vanishing operators will be consolidated into other stronger operators rather than just imploding overnight leaving customers/apps swinging in the breeze with their back-ends bared.

Parse.com is now part of Facebook so theoretically they're in a stronger position than many of their competitors. Their steep jumps in price are still a major kicker though.

MyPeopleDrankTheSoup

parse is an absolute POS. classic example of a solution looking for a problem.

The Corinthian

georgiecasey wrote: »

parse is an absolute POS. classic example of a solution looking for a problem.

Well, as with all these app-out-of-a-box and mobile WYSIWYG solutions it's targeting a very specific market:

• Design companies who dabble in Web sites using WYSIWYGs and want to be able to offer apps.
• Ideas monkeys, who have nothing beyond an 'idea' and reckon that something like parse will allow them to create the app themselves after which they can retire to a beach and watch the money roll in.

Of the latter, I think we've all seen a marked decrease in them in the last few months. Apps are just not as sexy as they were a year ago. Not surprising as I've certainly seen an overall drop in installs, which combined with eCPM attrition has made the whole market far less profitable. The good times are over, I suspect - it's a mature market now.

Anyhow, fewer idea monkeys, less demand for app-out-of-a-box and mobile WYSIWYG solutions in what is a crowded market. I expect quite a few of these to vanish in 2015, as a result.

Small caveat on the market for such solutions. Some of these can be useful if you're doing smoke and mirror prototyping too; whether for a client who you know won't read a spec or a VC who needs to be sold on a concept.

Graham

The Corinthian wrote: »

Well, as with all these app-out-of-a-box and mobile WYSIWYG solutions it's targeting a very specific market:

Are we talking about the same Parse.com The Corinthian?

When you talk about the app-out-of-the-box merchants, it brings to mind the drag and drop app builders that typically offer little more than pre-configured feed readers, drop in maps and static pages.

I'd think of Parse as purely backend. A NoSQL product with a GUI front end, a JSON interface, analytics and cross-platform push notifications.

The Corinthian

Graham wrote: »

Are we talking about the same Parse.com The Corinthian?

Fair enough, I've gone a wee bit OT. However, I do personally consider it to fall under the same broad category as these other app-out-of-the-box solutions.