If you are currently at roughly 0 active users, I would not worry about how much 500k active users cost. That said, I think something about your cost estimate

If you are currently at roughly 0 active users, I would not worry about how much 500k active users cost. That said, I think something about your cost estimate is way off. It should not cost $75k/mo to host 500k active users. My guess is that either: 1) Your use case analysis is on the high side 2) You are using parse incorrectly 3) Parse is a bad fit for your application You can rent 100s of servers from aws for $75k/mo. That should be way overkill to handle 500k active users.