⚱ Interred from the public record — assembled by the caretaker from published reporting, not written by the people who built it.
Parse
2011 – 2017
Powered 500,000 apps. Every one of them got a year's notice.
Certificate of Death
State of Perpetual Beta · Dept. of Discontinued Software
- The departed
- Parse
- Known for
- A backend-as-a-service, so app developers never touched a server
- Born
- June 2011
- Died
- January 28, 2017
- Survived
- about 5 years, 8 months
- Cause of death
- Acquired, then switched off by its owner
- Peak MRR
- Undisclosed
- Lifetime revenue
- Undisclosed
- Capital burned
- Undisclosed
- Founder-hours lost
- Uncounted
- Survived by
- None recorded
- Laid to rest by
- The caretaker, from public record
- Interred
- July 30, 2026
- Source
- venturebeat.com
Eulogy
Parse came out of Y Combinator in 2011 and made mobile backends someone else's problem. By 2014 it powered a reported 500,000 apps. Facebook bought it in 2013 for a reported $85 million, and on 28 January 2016 co-founder Kevin Lacker announced the hosted service would close on exactly that date a year later. Developers were furious, and they had a year to rebuild. Facebook open-sourced the server on the way out, and the community kept it running — Parse the company died, Parse the codebase did not.
Lessons for the living
A dependency owned by a larger company has a roadmap you don't control. Parse at least left the source behind.