I spent a little bit of time examining different options in this space a few weeks back, I found these options:<p>Firebase<p>Couchbase Mobile Sync Gateway<p>CouchDB<p>PouchDB<p>Amazon Cognito<p>Azure Mobile Data Sync<p>Cloudant<p>My main issues with Firebase (in order of importance) were:<p>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.<p>b) Single unmodifiable conflict resolution strategy<p>c) SaaS-only<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
In my opinion this makes Firebase <i>way</i> 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 (<a href="http://fireform.org/" rel="nofollow">http://fireform.org/</a> - 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.<p>Price jumps from 5 bucks to 50. Still too pricey for me.<p>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.
Summary of what's changed is available on their blog: <a href="https://www.firebase.com/blog/2015-08-19-announcing-lower-simpler-pricing.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.firebase.com/blog/2015-08-19-announcing-lower-si...</a>