StackMob is shutting down

[rradu]

We saw this coming when they announced that they were acquired by PayPal a couple of months ago, and read this line:

"When asked if StackMob will continue to operate as normal, he said it was too early to tell since the acquisition just closed today." http://venturebeat.com/2013/12/17/paypal-acquires-stackmob-t...

That was dead giveaway that they'd shut it down. We instead chose Parse for a project we were just starting, and it's worked out pretty well (except for the bugs they've been having the past week which don't allow us to create new columns or deploy).

[fizzbar]

> (except for the bugs they've been having the past week which don't allow us to create new columns or deploy)

thanks for reminding me why i'll never outsource my app's primary datastore. 'tis a bridge too far.

[HectorRamos]

Hey, Parse employee here, I work in the support team. Shoot me an email, [email protected]

[fbpcm]

Here's StackMob recommending people switch from Parse after FB acquired them.

https://blog.stackmob.com/2013/04/27011/

[dfcarney]

"Thank you, our customers, for believing in us." is such an obnoxious and insincere statement. If anything, their customers only went with them because StackMob gave assurances (or at least the impression) of stability. I wish they were just upfront, sincere, and a bit apologetic.

[rurounijones]

Question:

Do the kind of people who work at places like stackmob, once their product has been killed, really want to work in other departments at paypal upgrading ancient systems?

(According to the article rradu posted this was why they were aquihired)

It seems like they would run away as soon as possible since they worked at a place like stackmob over paypal in the first place. (I assume there are some sort of retention bonuses etc to try and keep them.)

[gamache]

I worked at a PayPal acqui-hire. For a while, it was pretty good! We suddenly had EBAY RSU's instead of maybe-someday-money and the work didn't change (as the mothership decided what exactly to do with us). That lasted about three months, after which our product got spiked and we were tossed in on very PayPal-y projects.

To answer your question: not really. Some of us found a niche at a place like PayPal, but a lot of us tried and weren't cut out for it.

My heart goes out to StackMob and its employees. Get paid.

[colinbartlett]

That damn vesting period. Keeping unhappy employees around since 1995®.

[jey]

Ouch, so any product that relies on StackMob will need to reimplement and deploy its entire backend by May 11th?

[aaronpk]

Sounds like an opportunity for some of the other backend providers to create a migration guide and import tools!

[ipsin]

Might as well wait for something more official than a message on pastebin?

[ndrake]

I got an email from Pastebin about it.

[mukundmr]

When I did my study on the BaaS providers last year, most of them were venture funded and not profit making and almost all of them were in the business for only a few short years. The only profit making / long term businesses that were into this space were Kii and Apigee App Services. The rest appeared to be candidates for acquisition.

[bashcoder]

> Thank you, our customers, for believing in us. It’s because of you that we’re able to move on, to rise to a new challenge, and to make a real difference.

I'm always happy when a company does well. But when a company's success isn't in the best interest of their customers, there's a fundamental disconnect. It is, after all, possible to advocate for existing customers during M&A negotiations.

In this case, their believing customers are now rewarded by having their software assets freshly encumbered by technical debt. What was sold as a solution is now a problem. So maybe it's just me, but it seems that the proper disposition should be one of apology, not celebration.

[jmduke]

As context, StackMob was acquired less than two months ago (December 17th) by PayPal.

[adammil]

The announcement was good enough for pastebin but not their own homepage?

[mathattack]

A lot of folks are writing that this is bad for employees. Is it worse for employees (who may have been sold a bill of goods joining) or worse for customers (who may have been sold a bill of goods signing up)?

My sense is there is a little bit of "Let the buyer beware" on both because both employees and customers know what they're getting into with a startup. That said, the employees should at least get some stock out of it. Should early customers ask for stock too?

[ajeet_dhaliwal]

From the perspective of a non-paying customer who was testing out the service although not seriously considering it I am kind of shocked even though I know I should not be. This will damage all their competitors in BaaS. No way anyone with any sense would want to risk this sort of thing again, this confirms the worst fears of using service like this. Amazon may well be the winner as usual when custom solutions become more favourable again.

[andreas_fey]

Hi, I work at apiOmat (http://www.apiomat.com).

We will provide a migration script for former Stackmob users later this day, so getting apps back running should be a minimum pain. Also, to compensate for your lost time, you can get one month free medium plan with the voucher "stackmobOmat" :-)

[jeffgreco]

This was my fear for Parse after FB acquired them. Are there any other interesting competitors to Parse out there?

[csmajorfive]

You could just use Parse. We're not going anywhere.

[Ethan_Mick]

CloudMine[0] is also a BaaS company (Disclaimer: I work for CloudMine). We're focusing a lot on enterprise and making a robust system that companies can really deploy on.

If you have any thoughts or comments feel free to ask!

[0] https://cloudmine.me/

[mfenniak]

I've heard good things about Apigee. My understanding is that their backend-as-a-service is built upon the acquired and open-sourced usergrid technology, which leaves you the option of hosting it yourself in the event they ever go ahead and terminate their own service. That's not a bad out to have.

[troymc]

There's a list of Backend as a Service (BaaS) providers at:

http://www.mobilechameleon.com/web-services-for-use-by-mobil...

[Myztiq]

Disclaimer: I work for Kinvey on their development team.

Kinvey[1] is another BaaS platform with a pricing model based on users instead of API calls. We also have quite a few integrations, including the ability to run code on a pre-save/post-save on a different server if you so desired.

At the end of the day, there are a bunch of decent choices out there, it all depends on what features and pricing fit your needs.

1: http://kinvey.com

[nayefc]

Can a team of 24 people fix PayPal? No.

[apierre]

I am also considering to use Parse but I am still tempted to use StrongLoop (http://strongloop.com/mobile-application-development/loopbac...)

[cmelbye]

"To ease the transition, we are launching a data exporter to help you get all your data out of StackMob in CSV format."

Ouch, that's probably the bare minimum they could've possibly done.

[Faryar]

Poor developers who thought they can rely on them!

[jasonlotito]

From their home page...

Partners and Customers who Trust StackMob

[pbreit]

Shouldn't they be able to find someone to take over the service? I realize that's not a big priority but still.

[helper]

They couldn't turn a profit from their business, why do you think someone else would want it?