Parse

Parse was the back end for mobile apps that did not want a back end: data storage, logins, push notifications and server code behind a simple API. By 2014 it was reported to power 500,000 apps. Facebook bought it for $85 million in 2013 and gave it a year's notice in 2016. The open source version it left behind is still running today.

Timeline [edit]

2011

4 August 2011 Launch

Parse launches

A back end for mobile apps: storage, logins and push, behind an SDK.

9 November 2011 Funding

$5.5 million Series A

2013

25 April 2013 Acquisition

Facebook buys Parse

About $85 million.

2014

2014 Peak

500,000 apps

Reported apps running on the platform.

2016

28 January 2016 Shutdown announced

A year's notice, and the code

Facebook open sources the platform on the day it announces the closure.

2017

28 January 2017 Shutdown

The hosted service closes

Parse Platform continues as a community open source project.

Metric	Value	As of	Confidence
Registered accounts ▲	500,000	2014	Reported Apps reported to be running on Parse

Metric

Value

As of

Confidence

Registered accounts ▲

500,000

2014

Reported Apps reported to be running on Parse

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Facebook announced on 28 January 2016 that the Parse hosted service would close in exactly one year, and open sourced the platform the same day. The service shut down on 28 January 2017.

Our analysis: Parse was infrastructure, which is the worst thing to buy from a company that might change its mind. Facebook acquired it to court mobile developers, decided three years later that this was not a business it wanted, and closed it. The year of notice and the open sourcing were unusually decent, and it still meant half a million apps had to be rebuilt.

History [edit]

A Heroku for mobile apps

Tikhon Bernstam, Ilya Sukhar, James Yu and Kevin Lacker founded Parse in 2011 out of Y Combinator, and TechCrunch described it on day one as a Heroku for mobile apps. The pitch was aimed at a real problem: building an iPhone app was one skill, and running the servers, database, user accounts and push notifications behind it was an entirely different one.

Parse did that part. You added an SDK, and you had storage, authentication, push and, from September 2012, custom server-side code, without ever configuring a machine. It raised $5.5 million in November 2011, was used by 20,000 developers in 2012 with that number growing 40 percent a month, and Fast Company named it one of the fifty most innovative companies of 2013.

Bought for $85 million

Facebook acquired Parse in April 2013. The logic was that Facebook wanted to be where mobile developers built things, and owning their back end was a good way to be there.

By 2014 Parse was reported to be powering 500,000 apps.

One year's notice

On 28 January 2016 Facebook announced that the hosted service would shut down on 28 January 2017, exactly a year later, and open sourced the entire platform on the same day, along with a database migration tool and a Parse Server you could run yourself.

That is close to the best way to end a service like this, and it was still brutal. Every one of those apps needed a developer to notice, care, and do work. Plenty had been shipped by agencies for clients who had long since stopped paying anyone.

What survived

Parse Platform still exists as a community-run open source project, with its own documentation, forum and releases. Apps that migrated to a self-hosted Parse Server kept working and many still do.

The company is gone, the hosted service is gone, and the software outlived both.

Last verified: 13 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).

Timeline [edit]

The site through time

Ownership [edit]

Key figures [edit]