You are bringing a senior consideration to the table; they can and do change their pricing at any time for any reason. Also, every single day you rely on them is a day that your architecture grows on that volatile cornerstone. Would look at https://parseplatform.org/ or https://postgrest.org/ as alternatives; turnkey, hosted solutions are available for each.
The open source dashboard has a bunch of functions that are missing from the then hosted parse.com service. I tried to solve some of them with Parboard:
- a hosted service means you don't need to fiddle with configuring and deploying a new dashboard every time you set up a new parse-server instance
- analytics are completely missing from the regular dashboard, and there doesn't seem to be any plans for future support, so I thought I'd help automate the process of integrating with popular analytics providers (mainly GA's universal analytics).
- a highly requested feature that was never supported on parse.com was allowing collaborators to access the data browser; Parboard allows you to invite and add collabs to your app so they can access and browse / edit data, but with limited functionality (ie collabs can't edit / delete the database's schema)
- you can define jobs on parse-server, but can't schedule them to run; Parboard integrates with a cron service to allow scheduling jobs for running in the background
The biggest issue I'm facing right now is that to use Parboard the user must make changes to their parse-server configuration (mostly adding cloud code functions now), but I'm hoping to streamline the implementation process in the future.
If the cash deposit covered the complete value of the item no renter would want to pay such a high cost(the renter would then be vulnerable to theft; same with a credit card), and if the deposit didn't cover the value of the item then a thief would still benefit.
>What solutions have been used for other 'sharing econom[ies]'?
Two things come to mind, rental cars and places like rent-a-center. To rent a car you have to give ID and a credit card, and if the car is stolen the police can and will be contacted. Whereas with rent-a-center they can't call the police, police don't deal well with "small" stolen items. Rent-a-centers employ call centers that harass the person into paying or retuning and calls family and friends to shame the person into paying. If that doesn't work they turn it over to a collections agency who has the power to continue to harass and even ruin someones credit.
I don't see something like this working P2P and in the startup space, it requires too much "infrastructure" if you will, to work and be successful in deterring and overcoming theft, loss and damage.
