Similar to the cousin comment here, if you do need to use third-party services (it's often highly preferable to avoid re-inventing the wheel), try to find one that is open source / supported by an open source community. For example, when planning for a new dashboard last year I was choosing between Angular, Ember, and React. Without starting a flame war (they all have their benefits), Angular and React were disqualified in my mind largely on the basis of their propreitary nature. This ended up being a pretty lucky / safe call with regard to Angular, as migrating to 2.0 would have required a large rewrite.
In the case of Parse, it's good to remember that there are often less flashy, less cool, but much more stable alternatives to these kinds of services. I mentioned on another thread that CouchDB is a pretty awesome choice in this regard. Apache services are never the cool choice, but if they're anything it's stable.