Backend as a Service Providers vs a Custom Backend

What backend as a service providers offer

Backend as a service providers give you a hosted database, authentication, file storage and an automatic API over your tables, managed from a console. You start in an afternoon and you never run a server. Pricing usually starts low per project and grows with storage, requests and users.

• Strength: speed to the first working screen.
• Strength: no infrastructure to operate.
• Weakness: the API mirrors your tables, not your product, so business actions end up in client code or serverless functions.
• Weakness: moving away later means rewriting the backend on another stack.

What a custom backend offers

A custom backend is code your team writes and runs: a framework, a database, endpoints designed for your product, your own auth and your own docs.

• Strength: full control over design, performance and data.
• Strength: no dependence on one provider.
• Weakness: weeks of work before the first feature, repeated for every project.
• Weakness: docs, tests and client examples drift unless someone maintains them.

What a generated backend offers

A generated backend starts from your description, schema, sheet or spec and produces a designed API: resources, relations, custom actions, validation, auth, docs, tests and, increasingly, MCP tools for AI agents. It runs on managed hosting like a backend as a service, and it exports as code like a custom backend.

• Strength: the speed of a service with an API shaped around your product.
• Strength: code export removes lock in.
• Strength: docs, tests and agent tools stay in sync with the schema.
• Weakness: unusual logic still needs code, which you add in the export or in custom actions.

How to choose

• Weekend prototype with no plans to scale: a backend as a service is enough.
• Product with complex, unique domain logic and a strong backend team: write it yourself, and generate the boilerplate around it.
• Product with standard resources and a small team, agency projects or anything that needs AI agent access: a generated backend gives the best speed to control ratio.

Questions to ask any provider

• Can I export my code and data, and in what form?
• How are API keys stored and rotated?
• What does the API look like for my business actions, not only for my tables?
• How do docs and client examples stay correct after a schema change?
• How do AI agents connect, and with which permissions?
• What do quotas count, and what happens at the limit?

Where APIGenerator fits

APIGenerator is a generated backend. It turns your source into REST, GraphQL and MCP APIs, hosts them with environments, logs and analytics, and exports the code on every plan. Compare it in detail on the backend as a service page, and see the hosting side on backend hosting.