Para
The backend for busy developers
We’re excited to announce a powerful new addition to Para: built-in support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP). With this update, your Para backend can now communicate directly with AI assistants like Claude, Codex or Gemini, allowing you to talk to your backend in a natural conversation.
Static websites are cool, until they need a contact form. The moment you add one, you have to wire up a backend service, pay for a third-party form provider, or send users to a mailto link and hope for the best. So, we rolled out a new feature in Para - HTML form handling.
Para has always been a backend for people who don’t want to manage a backend. With the new forms feature, that promise now includes HTML form handling. You can set up a contact form, capture leads, or manage support requests. Para will validate the submission, verify the CAPTCHA, send the email, and optionally store the message. No backend code is needed.
I integrated the backend service into my other SaaS to boost sales and it worked! Customers can now pay for the Para hosting service by purchasing credits on the Scoold Cloud hosting service. An app credit is used to power one Scoold server and essentially represents the payment for the backend of the application. The growth is steady but slow. I'm fine with that!
ParaIO.com is now a truly global backend service! We have deployed Para to 2 more locations, California (US) and Tokyo (JP). All the data is seamlessly replicated to all regions. There are very few backend services out there which offer multi-region replication for both the database and the search index.
Our clients seem to enjoy the generous free plan and use ParaIO.com as their backend, but the paid users grow slowly. Over the years I noticed that I should be targeting small independent developers because companies prefer a self-hosted solution due to privacy concerns for their data. This is still an option of course, because Para 100% open source software. At least my Para BaaS brings me enough money for pizza!
The Para SaaS project got its first 1000 active users. We offer a free plan for developers and it basically provides free hosting for your Para applications. At that time, all active users wer on the free plan. Although I had zero paid users so far, I kept improving the service and adding features.
ParaIO.com was launched, providing managed (serverless) backend services for developers who want to store their data somewhere and use a JSON REST API to access that data. All data is searchable and can be retrieved quickly. The project was launched on the AWS cloud.
I decided to create a hosting service for Para running on the AWS cloud. Clients would be able to easily build applications without worrying about the backend or hosting their own Para server. The hosted service would have some extra features making backend operations easier.
I noticed I was writing pretty much the same backend logic over and over again so I decided to refactor some of my code and create a separate generic framework for backend operations. Later, I wanted that same code to run as a backend server separately from my applications and I wanted to connect to it via REST API.
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