Parse
The mobile back-end service that 600,000 apps relied on, until Facebook bought it and shut it down
- Founded
- 2011
- Closed
- 2017
- Lifespan
- 6 years
- Total funding
- $7 million
- Country
- United States
- City
- Menlo Park
- Sector
- Enterprise software (SaaS)
- Founders
- Tikhon Bernstam, Ilya Sukhar, Kevin Lacker, James Yu
- Investors
- Y Combinator, Ignition Partners
- At its peak
- Around 600,000 apps relied on Parse's infrastructure at the time of the shutdown.
- Cause of closure
- Acquired and shut down
What did it do?
Parse was a back-end platform that gave mobile app developers the server side as a ready-made service. By handling data storage, user log-in, push notifications and running custom code in the cloud through SDKs and APIs, it let small teams ship apps without setting up their own servers.
Why did it shut down?
A Y Combinator graduate, Parse raised USD 5.5 million in November 2011 in a round led by Ignition Partners, bringing its total funding to USD 7 million. Facebook bought the company in April 2013, and Parse became the first paid enterprise service the social network offered developers; the price was reported to be around USD 85 million. The platform kept growing and was reported to power 500,000 apps in 2014. Even so, on 28 January 2016 Facebook announced it would shut the service down; Kevin Lacker, Parse's CTO, wrote that they needed to focus their resources elsewhere. The hosted service ended on 30 January 2017, and developers had to move their apps to the open-source Parse Server or to other providers.
The story
Parse was founded in 2011 by Tikhon Bernstam, Ilya Sukhar, Kevin Lacker and James Yu, and went through Y Combinator. The idea was simple: small teams writing mobile apps should hand off the work of setting up servers, managing databases and building notification infrastructure to a ready-made service. In November 2011 the company raised USD 5.5 million in a round led by Ignition Partners, bringing its total funding to USD 7 million. At the time the platform had 3,500 developers and the team numbered just seven.
In April 2013 Facebook bought Parse. Parse became the first paid enterprise service the social network offered developers, and the price was reported to be around USD 85 million. Serving around 60,000 apps at the time of the acquisition, the platform kept growing; it was reported to power 500,000 apps in 2014, and by the time of the shutdown around 600,000 apps relied on Parse.
On 28 January 2016 Facebook announced that it would shut the service down a year later. Kevin Lacker, Parse's CTO, wrote that they were proud to have helped developers but needed to focus their resources elsewhere. To ease the transition, the company open-sourced Parse Server and released a database migration tool. The hosted service stopped completely on 30 January 2017.
The shutdown hit independent developers who lacked the resources to build their own back end particularly hard. The open-source Parse Server lived on afterwards as a community project with its own documentation and forum, but the company Parse and the managed service it offered passed into history. The story is a reminder that once an infrastructure start-up joins a big platform, its fate lies no longer with its own customers but with the buyer's priorities.
Lessons for founders
- When an infrastructure start-up is sold to a big platform, the product's fate becomes tied to the buyer's priorities; pin down commitments to keep the product alive during acquisition talks.
- If your customers' businesses run on your servers, design for data portability from the start; Parse's decision to open-source its code and allow a year-long migration period limited the damage of the shutdown.
- Reaching hundreds of thousands of apps does not protect a product unless it holds a central place in the parent company's strategy; ask why the buyer wants you, and whether that will still be true a few years on.
Sources
- Parse, Inc. (Wikipedia)
- Parse, The 'Heroku For Mobile', Raises $5.5 Million Series A (TechCrunch, 2011-11-09)
- Facebook Buys Parse To Offer Mobile Development Tools As Its First Paid B2B Service (TechCrunch, 2013-04-25)
- Facebook is shutting down its Parse cloud service on January 28, 2017 (VentureBeat, 2016-01-28)
- Facebook's Parse developer platform is shutting down today (TechCrunch, 2017-01-30)
This section is compiled from public sources (Wikidata, news archives and company announcements). Figures are given as they appear in those sources; unknown fields are left blank. If you spot a mistake in an entry, you can send us a correction.
Is something in this entry wrong? Request a correction → Method