Parse is dead. The great diaspora has begun. The gold rush is on. There’s a huge opportunity for some to feed and grow on Parse’s 600,000 fleeing customers.

Where should you go? What should you do? By now you’ve transitioned through all five stages of grief and ready for stage six: doing something about it. Fortunately there are a lot of options and I’ve gathered as many resources as I can here in one place.

There is a Lot Pain Out There

Parse closing is a bigger deal than most shutterings. There’s even a petition: Don't Shut down Parse.com. That doesn’t happen unless you’ve managed to touch people. What could account for such an outpouring of emotion?

Parse and the massive switch to mobile computing grew up at the same time. Mobile is by definition personal. Many programmers capable of handling UI programming challenge were not as experienced with backend programming and Parse filled that void. When a childhood friend you grew to depend on dies, it hurts. That hurt is deep. It goes into the very nature of how you make stuff, how you grow, how you realize your dreams, how you make a living. That’s a very intimate connection.

For a trip through memory lane Our Incredible Journey is a tumblr chronicling many services that are no longer with us.

Some reactions from around the net:

maxado_zdl: F*ck you facebook!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

pacp_ec: Damn it Facebook only George R. R. Martin is allowed to kill my heroes

Mythul: I really hate facebook right now ! Thanks for screwing up my apps with your bad business model!

Mufro: Damn. We've been slowly migrating our smaller apps to Parse as we make annual updates. Now we're trying to figure out what we're gonna do... go back to the pain of rolling our own server backends out? This leaves a pretty big hole in the market IMO. I don't know of anyone who gets you off the ground as quickly and affordably as Parse does. It's been a joy to use their product, but I knew deep down it was too good to be true. I guess we'll have to take a look at AWS again, maybe Azure. We use Firebase in another project, so we might check that out too. This sucks though.

samwize7: When Facebook acquired Parse, I thought it is good news since they ain't profitable, and now they have a backing of a giant, who tried hard to woo developers. I built many mobile apps using Parse, and has always been a fan of how they build a product for developers. Their documentation is awesome, their free tier is generous, their SDK covers widely. Today, their announcement is a sad news. And once again, proves that we can't trust Facebook.

clev1: This literally just ruined my day....I've got 2 major projects near completion that I've been using Parse as a BaaS for. Anyone with experience know how difficult or a transition it is to switch to Firebase?

solumamantis: I just can't believe the service is being retired... I started using three months ago - my new app coming out soon is completely reliant on it..... I will have a look on Firebase, but honestly I think i will build my own Parse/Node.js version and manage it myself....

changingminds: What the f*ck. Wtf am I supposed to do with 120k users who currently use my app that uses parse? I gotta redo the entire f*cking backend? F*cking bullsh*t.

manooka: My entire startup relies on Parse. I developed the website and apps myself as this was perfect for me as a Front-end developer without having to worry about back-end servers/databases etc. This is SERIOUSLY bad news.

stuntmanmikey: I'm a full-stack developer who is part of a startup that depends on Parse. As the only developer, the amount of time we've saved NOT having to write a data access layer and web service layer has been a windfall for us. Now I'm left to either switch to a similar product (Firebase just doesn't have the same appeal to me) or implement the backend myself at great cost.

neckbeardfedoras: The thing is, most of the folks using Parse probably use it because they're not full stack or back end developers. Removal of Parse means more time or money spent on resources to manage a back end system.

Why did Facebook Shutdown Parse?