Using Firebase in production

Question

I was developing a food ordering app using Ionic & Firebase for a local restaurant. Having limited knowledge in any backend language, and lazy to spend time on that, I was thinking of using Firebase to store the data as it has everything that I need. I only doubt if it is a good idea to use that in production for the whole app. Expecting around 10-20 orders a day (in the beginning), I also doubt about the space the app will eat up every day, and what plan I should subscribe to.

Thanks

Answer 1

Firebase team member here.

We have a lot of large customers who use Firebase in production.

The main metric to be aware of are the concurrent users. Basically, how many devices are connected to the app at the same time.

The free plan covers you up until 100 concurrent users. The $5 spark plan gives you a custom domain. After that you have unlimited concurrent uses but there's different metrics like data storage and bandwidth to be aware of.

For your use case I believe you would be just fine on the free plan.

Also, if you're building and Ionic app, check out our AngularFire library. It will save you a lot of time and make developing your app a lot more enjoyable.

Answer 2

@David East All Others,

Coming back here after around 5 years after my initial question . Over the time has firebase had bought in some major upgrade's to use it as a single platform for all your backend needs . It has a solution for all your problems and with NOSQL DB, you will be able to ship your product . I was able to ship a PWA on react with using Firestore for an organization in 3 weeks time . The average server charges are also considerably low for any other alternate solution you would choose.

Answer 3

Two years after going live with firebase production, I still believe the firebase with a proper schema is one way to approach your new startup. Being a front end developer, using firebase did help me ship my MVP fast and also pave the first days as a full stack dev.

However not following a flattened well planned schema did bring few roadblocks as we were trying to expand.

Firebase for sure is costly, and it has been increasing. As for the future of the product, Firebase is not the place to keep the data for the long term.

I definitely look forward for the day where I can show Firebase Team, what i managed to built over the years with Firebase @David East.