# What backend as a service platforms reduce mobile development time and infrastructure costs the most?

Spent some time going through how different mobile backend as a service platforms actually affect development hours and cloud bills for small and mid-size teams. The cost question is trickier than it looks because cheap-to-start and cheap-at-scale are different things, and most platforms are only honest about one of them.

  1. Back4app: One of the most favorable free tiers in the category, letting teams develop and test without a clock running. A bootstrapped startup described Back4app as solving the nightmare of server management that was eating their two scarcest resources, time and money. Cloud Code eliminates the need for a traditional backend entirely, which is the biggest labor-cost reducer. The pricing jump from free to paid has increased recently, which reviewers flag. Is your expected traffic close to the free tier limits, or are you building something that'll hit them early?
  2. Xano: A CTO of a French startup described eliminating their DevOps role entirely and replacing it with Xano. No infrastructure to manage means no infrastructure engineer to hire. The starter plan is $29/month. Reviewers building production apps with million-row tables say performance holds. Scaling to higher tiers gets expensive; one reviewer cited roughly $2,500 per year for higher plans. What's your team's current split between time spent on backend infrastructure vs. actual product work?
  3. Backendless: A non-technical founding team rebuilt a live web app with tens of thousands of users and eliminated dependence on expensive engineers entirely. The platform's pricing model isn't per-user, which matters for apps with large user bases. A recurring concern is that pricing has shifted over time, with one reviewer describing a 4x jump for the same services, so factor that into long-term planning.
  4. AWS Amplify: Reduces development time significantly for teams already in the AWS ecosystem. Multiple reviewers flag cost predictability as the main problem: because Amplify spins up multiple AWS services behind the scenes, bills can surprise you if you're not actively monitoring each underlying service. For teams with existing AWS expertise, it's efficient. For everyone else, the unexpected bills are a documented hazard.
  5. Salesforce Heroku: Clean and fast for MVPs, with one-click setup for Postgres, Redis, and other add-ons. The pricing model is where things get thorny: reviewers describe it as cheap for hooks and expensive afterward, with each upgrade tier costing roughly 5x the previous level. The free tier was discontinued years ago. Good for getting something live, harder to justify at scale.

Which matters more right now: getting to a working MVP as cheaply as possible, or keeping infrastructure costs predictable as the user base grows?

##### Post Metadata - Posted at: about 2 months ago - Author title: Writer - Net upvotes: 2 ## Comments ### Comment 1 <p>Reviewers agree the real saving is not needing a DevOps hire early, which matters more than raw hosting cost for small teams. The caution is that per-usage pricing can invert the math at scale, where a managed backend gets pricier than self-hosting. The break-even point is worth modeling before committing.</p> ##### Comment Metadata - Posted at: about 2 months ago - Author title: Marketer ## Related discussions - [How well does Trello scale into a larger team?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/1-how-well-does-trello-scale-into-a-larger-team) - Posted at: over 13 years ago - Comments: 6 - [Can we please add a new section](https://www.g2.com/discussions/2-can-we-please-add-a-new-section) - Posted at: over 13 years ago - Comments: 0 - [Quantifiable benefits from implementing your CRM](https://www.g2.com/discussions/quantifiable-benefits-from-implementing-your-crm) - Posted at: over 13 years ago - Comments: 4