Parse made a lot of sense to me. Building a simple backend isn't much work, but operating it sucks. You get to deal with script kiddies, hackers, hard drives dying, services crapping themselves at inconvenient times of day, backups, testing backups, security updates (and what is probably more work, monitoring security updates) for the OS and web server and proxy and db and on and on. Maybe there isn't a pricing model that makes this work, but I think there's a real desire.