I haven't worked with Parse, but the announcement reminds me of something I decided to do as much as I can. We sometimes choose to build features on top of thi

I haven't worked with Parse, but the announcement reminds me of something I decided to do as much as I can. We sometimes choose to build features on top of third-party vendors' services, and the reality's that unless that third-party derives decent revenue or primarily provides that service; one shouldn't expect that the service will always be available. Twitter was a good example, Google SEO is another, where people who were relying mostly on search traffic got wiped when algorithms were changed. It takes longer at times, and seems like reinventing the wheel, but for features that I deem to be very useful to my users, I choose to roll out the relevant underlying detail myself. In most cases there are often already third-party libraries that can help with bootstrapping the features. I'm glad that the parse-server is available so people can run their own local instance though.