we would like to develop a real time event driven chat app for mobile. Our system will have peak user connections in the some parts of the day. We want to handle all of those connections without hassle. To do this, we are thinking to develop or use a third party API(like in Firebase).
We, however as an inexperienced startup developers - we developed only 1 project as a team before in ASP.NET, - could not decide which to choose. Which would be better, if we set up everything ourselves and use Node.js, Socket.io, MongoDB and our servers, or we thought to using Parse, or Firebase - they also both have positive sides and drawbacks.- We also open to another suggestions.
We want rock-solid entrance to the market so and we also have low budget initally. But it is possible we may go invitation-only app, then later we grow our userbase. Thanks in advance.