What is and what can Firebase Do??

 Firebase is a platform developed by google for developing web and mobile application. It will help you build improve and grow your app.  It was originally an independent company founded in 2011. In 2014, Google acquired the platform and it is now their flagship offering for app development.  

What sort of apps is Firebase good for?

There’s really no limit for the types of apps that can be helped by Firebase products. There are only limits to the platforms it can be used on. iOS and Android are the primary targets for the Firebase SDKs, and there’s increasing support for web, Flutter, Unity, and C++. You should also know there’s an Admin SDK available for a variety of languages, to be used with any backend components you might require. 

Firebase provides a bunch of cool services like:

Authentication — user login and identity where there are different types of authentication available like Email,Phone number,Facebook ,Google login can be implemented

Realtime Database — realtime, cloud hosted, NoSQL database. Firebase uses tree like structure with nodes.

Cloud Firestore — realtime, cloud hosted, NoSQL database. It consists of collection and documents.

Cloud Storage — massively scalable file storage

Cloud Functions — “serverless”, event driven backend

Firebase Hosting — global web hosting . Firebase provides hosting for your web application.

ML Kit —SDK for common ML tasks. ML kit can be used t create different projects with object detection, recognition, image to text conversion etc.

In App-Messaging: It helps you to engage with users who are actively using your app.

Cloud Messaging: Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) was formally known as Google Cloud Messaging. It is used to send push notifications & messages on iOS, Android and web applications.

Crashlytics: It helps you to understand how many crashes occur in your app.

Dynamic links: Dynamic links are the app link that works differently depending on the operating system and can be used to redirect the users from one platform to another.

Remote config: You can easily configure some basic functionality of your app through remote config like changing color, hide & display text, etc.

Performance Monitoring: You can easily monitor your app performance.

Predictions: It’s a machine learning tool from Firebase that helps you to analyze better whether a particular user will return to your app or not.

Test Lab: Gives you free 5 tests/day on real devices and 10 tests/day on virtual devices which is a reasonable amount if you are just an individual developer. But if you are a big software company, you should purchase a blazing plan whose price is also reasonable if you are from the USA and the UK based company and maybe this price feels big for Asian countries like India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Learn more 

Google Cloud Platform: If you are dealing with a high amount of data then you segregate your data into Big Query (a platform from Google) then obviously you can easily generate that income which is fair enough to pay the bills.

Pricing

The main highlight of all this is that firebase is free upto a limit. As far as a small developer who has started this would be more than enough.

All other Firebase Auth features are free to use on all plans. Prices are per successful verification. On the Blaze plan, Phone Authentication provides a perpetual free tier. The first 10K verifications for both instances (USA, Canada, and India and All other countries) are provided for free each month.

Firebase categorized its plans into two parts:

Spark Plan (Free) – Basic

Blaze Plan (Paid) – Advanced

A lot of people are thinking about where the Flame plan has gone?

As of January 2020, Flame Plan is not available for new users anymore.