BaaS Provider Quickblox Offers Unlimited API Calls and Push Notifications

by Kin Lane on 02/26/2013

Backend as a Service (BaaS) provider QuickBlox announced new pricing plans, which includes a free tier up to 10GB in traffic and storage, with unlimited API calls and push notifications.

The BaaS space is heating up with lots of discussion about whether you should charge developers by active user, features, storage or API call--with each provider being pretty vocal about where they stand. Quickblox is approach similar to StackMob, who refuses to charge based upon API call, atributing it to a sucess tax. But Quickblox is somewhat different, as they still charge for hard costs like bandwidth and storage--Stackmob only charges by feature.

I'm trying to understand all the approaches to BaaS pricing, which was also a panel discussion last week at API Strategy & Practice between Parse, Stackmob, Kinvey, Kii, Cloudmine and Firebase. I don't think there is a one size fits all strategy here, but I predict the conversation around BaaS pricing will continue to heat up in 2013 as the market continues to define itself.