Build and host the server side of your iOS or Android app for free with Applicasa

If you’re looking to join the app development craze and don’t know where to get started, hosting service Applicasa wants to be your app’s home, for free. It might sound too good to be true, but the service will provide all of the server side hosting and maintenance in an easy to use interface, for free, until your app hits 100k users. That would be a good problem to have, huh?

If you have the vision for the next big thing on Apple’s App Store, but don’t have the technical chops to build databases, then Applicasa is most definitely for you. In fact, the site claims that it provides enough tools to get your app’s server side environment going in 10 minutes or less. Support for the Android Market is coming in April.

Applicasa has a graphical interface for database creation, custom queries, as well as a CMS for management of updates, beta version deployment and push notifications.

Big plans, big opportunity

The CEO of Applicasa, Lior Malenboim, says this about the opportunity his company has:

We plan to become a “Home for Apps” by creating a solution and community for developers in which they can host and publish their apps and help each other by sharing code, solutions and ideas.

Without a doubt, there is a massive opportunity to help onboard small teams into app development, whether they already have a successful product on the web or are starting from scratch. By implementing a series of tools that allow you to drag and drop elements into a database, the company is hoping to spark the imaginations of a new generation of entrepreneurs.

As you can see in the screenshot below, creating new fields in your app’s database is as simple as clicking a few buttons and requires little or no coding know-how:

While Applicasa is free for startups and new apps, brands can manage existing apps on the platforms with prices that go up to $199 a month to support $300k users. For startups, the company hasn’t announced its pricing plan yet, but considering that it will take you a while to get to 100k users, it’s not a bad idea to get started by using its service.

By offering this service for free, the company is placing a huge bet on the potential to capture lightning in a bottle by ending up hosting the back end of a really popular app, say the next Instagram, and hope that the developers rely on the service enough to stay put as its app grows. From what I’ve seen, it might just be able to do that.

➤ Applicasa