Parse is shutting down today

This is a real bummer. I am not a programmer by profession (I am a PM), but I took time to learn Parse from scratch to quickly write my own app. I managed to launch my app on App store and everything was well till Parse announced their shutdown. Unfortunately, with a 1 yr old at home and a demanding work / commute, I didn't really have the time to learn about their migration guidance or educate myself on a new platform. So my App will stop working from today, which is a bummer.

For people who are more knowledgeable than me, I was really using Parse as a data store and using their APIs to store and retrieve data. I really liked their visual tools where I can create tables (classes) almost like in an excel document. This meant that I didn't have to learn a DB language. Is there a comparable tool that has similar features ? I have looked at Mongolab and Firebase and both seemed a lot more complicated than Parse. Or do I need to learn MongoDb now ?

Please stop this kind of promotional posting here. Hacker News is a community, and organized behavior like this is a serious abuse of it.

We've banned the accounts that were created to do this, and we'll have to ban the established participants if this doesn't stop.

This makes me wonder. If my startup reaches a certain amount of success, heck if only 5 customers, and for some reason I need to shut it down, what's a graceful way to deal with it.

I can give each customer all of their data back in a nicely formatted zip file etc. But is that enough? customers are more likely to want an equivalent service (remember the Google RSS reader fiasco?). Even if a customer finds an alternative service on their own, there should be a way to import the said zip file from their previous services. This brings in the idea of "service interoperability" (and related import/export) among startups that have no relation to each other. Apparently, standardizations like JSON etc, should make it easier.

Looks like a huge blind spot that the startup industry doesn't pay attention to. (Graceful shutdown and graceful import/export built in as a rule rather than the exception).

Parse is now completely open source: https://github.com/ParsePlatform/parse-server

Your app can also be migrated to a free alternative hosting provider with a single click: http://back4app.com/

I'm not sure if it's in the guidelines (and you're right, I don't see it there). I've seen 'dang and 'sctb bring it up multiple times. One such example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13242889#13243600

I'll note that 'dang is also pretty consistent about including the "without evidence" caveat as well, which I admit there does appear to be plenty. That said, contacting the mods (which I already did) is going to be the most effective way of stopping the behavior: they've got more information available and can not only get rid of the comments, but the accounts as well. Comments such as your tend to add to the noise, and unfortunately unlikely to stop the spamming. Don't misunderstand me: I'm frustrated by it as well.

Edit to add: 'sctb responded here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13524377