I don't think that's true: I've used Parse on several commercial projects where the cost and effort involved in developing internal back-end solutions was significantly more than using Parse. And it wasn't a case of adding in features we weren't going to do: this was implemented core feature sets.
Yes, there are trade-offs, and we still use internal systems and solutions for some of our projects where Parse isn't appropriate. However, I can categorically say it's saved us significant time and money - probably not a factor of ten, but large enough for us to continue looking to use it in the future.
This is why I'm calling it sensationalist. Think about what it would mean for someone to claim 100x faster - if they got it done in a week (and that's pretty damn fast for any decent piece of software, regardless of the environment or scope), they're claiming that they initially budgeted nearly two years. I'm saying that there is no way that ever happened.
Again, I said that there are benefits (and also trade-offs), but that this isn't game-changing. I'm not clear on where we disagree.
Yes, there are trade-offs, and we still use internal systems and solutions for some of our projects where Parse isn't appropriate. However, I can categorically say it's saved us significant time and money - probably not a factor of ten, but large enough for us to continue looking to use it in the future.