Kinvey Blog

My name is Eli and I run client services at Kinvey (they wisely don't trust me with my own HN account just yet...). While I can't promise that we'll never change any aspect of our pricing (since, as almost all growing companies, we'll almost certainly make at least a few tweaks over time), what I can promise is that we will never lose our commitment to what we've dubbed "success pricing" -- i.e. pricing that is not only compelling compared to the alternatives out there, but a model that directly aligns with a developer's growth goals. That is, our pricing will kick in and increase only when a developer directly benefits, and we feel strongly that this is the most fair and mutually beneficial way to go about pricing any such service (https://console.kinvey.com/#pricing).

Feel free to reach out directly with any additional questions / concerns -- all of my contact info can be found here: http://kinvey.com/eli-lederman

Appcelerator Cloud
http://www.appcelerator.com/platform/appcelerator-cloudservices/

App42
http://api.shephertz.com/

Kumulos
http://www.kumulos.com/

Kinvey
http://www.kinvey.com/

Apstrata
http://www.apstrata.com/

Buddy
http://buddy.com/

Stackmob
https://www.stackmob.com/

Proxomo
http://www.proxomo.com/

Iknode
http://iknode.com/

Kii
http://www.kii.com/en/technology

CloudMine
https://cloudmine.me/

Applicasa
http://www.applicasa.com/

MobDB
https://www.mobdb.net/

Windows Azure Mobile
http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/mobile/

FeedHenry
http://www.feedhenry.com/

-- My favorite ones are in the order of preference following :

Appcelerator (currently using it )

App42 ( tried it )

Stackmob (tried it )

Kumulos

Have you looked at Backend as a Service providers? What a BaaS platform provides is a way to avoid writing a lot of the server-side code. Which might be what you are looking for.

We are currently in beta testing right now. You might want to check it out:

* iKnode (http://iknode.com)

If you like an invite, just signup here: http://iknode.com/register/

If what iKnode offer doesn't match what you are looking for, don't dismiss the idea of a Backend as a Service just yet. Try the following as well:

* Parse (http://parse.com)

* Kinvey (http://kinvey.com)

* Stackmob (http://stackmob.com)

Among others...

EDIT: Fixed the Kinvey Link.

We want to make it as easy as possible to make an app multi-user and realtime.

The BaaS/etc ecosystem is large and the differences between products can certainly be confusing. Checkout this cool graphic from the team at Kinvey: http://www.kinvey.com/blog/2608/backend-as-a-service-welcomes-vendor-32-salesforcecom.

GoInstant is different in one very important way; we are built for real-time, multi-user, data-intensive applications. We call these Multiplayer Apps.

Basically it's a way to make your app as interactive as Google Docs, etc., we manage all the servers and scaling while providing a very straightforward client-side API.

You could pay for a NewRelic account, or invest the time in getting statsd+graphite or Riemann infrastructure set up. There are other systems too; it's a growth area.

"Monitoring-First Programming" to me means that monitoring and capturing errors in production is very valuable indeed. It's not a reason to abandon regular testing activities, but it is basically the same kind of thing as testing.

Links:
http://newrelic.com/

http://www.kinvey.com/blog/89/how-to-set-up-metric-collection-using-graphite-and-statsd-on-ubuntu-1204-lts

http://riemann.io/

> Don’t get stuck with building a platform stack with Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings from Heroku, CloudFoundry and OpenShift – we’ll give you out-of-the-box features that offer a much easier and richer user experience.

That's a useless pitch, it tells me nothing about the product, which simply generates an API for you. (I had to go to the website to figure that out -- http://www.kinvey.com/) I can't imagine this as a one-size-fits-all solution, except for the simplest of CRUD apps.

also: http://xkcd.com/927/