The struggle is real. Small fees add up for smaller startups and that used to be their bread and butter--it was so much easier to get payments up and running. We eventually switched to paypal and never looked back.
This is a tough business to be in and it's probably not recession proof. Good thing for them to raise all that cash so they get a longer runway if the economy goes south.
James and co. are bustin ass! How often do we see these guys working past midnight to help hackers at hackathons. I initially fell in love with the simplicity of the Firebase backend last summer. But Parse was ahead of the game with their iOS SDK and our apps have been running with them since.
James: not to copy Parse but I suggest a lot of sample code to get the n00bs up and running fast with your backend. Once you firebase, you'll never go back.