In my opinion this makes Firebase way more approachable. Previously, their limited number of connections made it very, very expensive very quickly. Storage seems like a much more logical scaling factor.
I'm glad there is a simple $5 plan. This makes hacking on my small project (http://fireform.org/ - plug) a much more reasonable proposition.
What is the actual difference between the Free ($0) and Spark ($5/mo.) plans? I see the difference in custom domain, but it hardly matters with a backend service like Firebase, doesn't it?
I just got this email too.
Price jumps from 5 bucks to 50. Still too pricey for me.
I did explore what they have to offer and it is fairly extensive. I'm not sure about performance though. I did not test that.
Are they worried about competition from Apple's CoreData, which Apple developers get as part of their registration?
What's the difference between the free plan and the $5 plan? They look exactly the same, unless I'm blind.
if only firebase could scale... they have so much downtime
Summary of what's changed is available on their blog: https://www.firebase.com/blog/2015-08-19-announcing-lower-si...
Come on guys, this ad isn't even disguised as a wired article.
I spent a little bit of time examining different options in this space a few weeks back, I found these options:
Firebase
Couchbase Mobile Sync Gateway
CouchDB
PouchDB
Amazon Cognito
Azure Mobile Data Sync
Cloudant
My main issues with Firebase (in order of importance) were:
a) Uncontrollable sync. It seems to always use a web sockets/long poll, and count how many connections you have. Which is not appropriate when data changes infrequently and you're concerned about your users battery life. Mainly, I wanted to be able to do push using GCM/etc.
b) Single unmodifiable conflict resolution strategy
c) SaaS-only
It seems very polished and easy to get started with, but since there was no upgrade path to anything else, the fact that it really wasn't a good fit for my sync needs made it seem like a bad option.
I'm not a huge fan of these systems in general since they have you connecting to a dedicated database that you plug code into (eg as a sync function), rather than exposing building blocks for you to build a sync service.
But I'm still using pouchdb on the client for the moment, and I haven't fully figured out what the backend will be, but at least I have a few options in pouchdb-server/couchbase/couchdb/cloudant.