Firebase engineer here. I hope you've been in touch with our support team and I'm sorry to see you've had so much trouble. You point out some genuine limitation

Firebase engineer here. I hope you've been in touch with our support team and I'm sorry to see you've had so much trouble. You point out some genuine limitations with our product. We have some great improvements in the pipeline and I'm sorry that they came too late for you. In case others have had similar experience, it's worth mentioning that some of these seem fixable by structuring your data differently[1]. Specifically, complaints 2-4 sound like they all arose from nesting all of your data in one tree[1] and using a query for all children[2]. This means you'll load too much data in every request, which will slow down your microservices and cause a large bill for unnecessary outbound traffic. #5 has two possible solutions. Either use the push() message to avoid any conflicts in the data you're writing or the transaction() method to manage the conflicts in an online-only mode. push() requires some work to recompose something from a series of changes, but has the advantage of being offline-compatible. Regarding #6, I agree we can better support data migrations (we're looking into it). If your problem is as simple as the one listed, I'd really recommend checking out a library like lodash[3]. The ugly if statement could have been if(_.has(user, 'new_subdocument.new_property')) { /* do stuff */ } or even: var thing = _.get(user, 'new_subdocument.new_property', default); // always do something with thing; we just added an in-memory // value that we would have made a data migration for in the // past. Finally, regarding queues, are you referring to firebase-queue?[4] This is an open-sourced part of our internal infrastructure. There are currently 16 issues open, but they seem to be mostly feature requests. If you've found bugs we'd love some repo steps. I hope that helps. We're always listening on firebase-talk@googlegroups.com, stackoverflow.com, and our slack channel. [1]: For a great article, see https://firebase.googleblog.com/2013/04/denormalizing-your-data-is-normal.html https://firebase.googleblog.com/2013/04/denormalizing-your-d... or the general Firebase data layout guide at https://firebase.google.com/docs/database/web/structure-data https://firebase.google.com/docs/database/web/structure-data [2]: Try using order + limitToFirst(N) https://firebase.google.com/docs/database/web/retrieve-data#filtering_data https://firebase.google.com/docs/database/web/retrieve-data#... [3]: https://lodash.com/ https://lodash.com/ [4]: https://github.com/firebase/firebase-queue https://github.com/firebase/firebase-queue