Comment by notfried
1 day ago
A million monthly active users, even free ones, would cost you ~$10K/month on LaunchDarkly. A million sounds like a lot, but "active" can mean one visit, even anonymous users. ~$120K/year for feature flags is a ridiculous line item.
These SaaS companies are only valued this much because they charge based on MAUs, not request-based. I prefer PostHog's model. 100M requests/month is ~$2K [*].
[*] I'm not affiliated with PostHog.
On Unleash Cloud: 100M request per month on Unleash cloud would be $235 + 75$ per seat ($53 Million requests included).
Launch Darkly charges on volume across multiple dimensions, including MAU and server-side connections, plus log, trace and error counts. It's bonkers and anyone who can actually predict what it will cost (good luck) will run away as fast as they can.
There is no way a Feature Flag system is a multi Billion dollar company based on the tech, and if there IS a Saas-pocalypse it's coming for players like LD first.
This seems entirely too dismissive of what LaunchDarkly's service does.
What would you recommend as an alternative?
There are a number of providers that provide flat-rate or near flat-rate pricing in this space. I'll go ahead and recommend featureflip.io as one such example. ConfigCat is another common one.
I am affiliated with featureflip but it does a ton of the same things for a sane price.
Posthog is absolutely awesome. Its free tier is insanely generous - 91% of its users don't pay anything or something.
We use it at a startup I'm involved in (~5k MAU) and we have never paid a penny which I am constantly surprised by since it's such a backbone for us.
Put flags in your own DB(s)?
9 replies →
Unleash Cloud ?
[flagged]
Biased answer since I work on Unleash, but the pricing point is something we thought about deliberately:
- Self-hosted open source is free, with no usage limits. Run it on your own Postgres and you pay for a small VM.
- Paid plans are priced per seat (people using the admin UI), not per end user or per request. One million MAUs or a hundred million costs the same (we have some protection for high traffic volumes)
- Server-side SDKs evaluate locally, so a flag check never hits our servers and there's nothing to meter. Frontend traffic goes through Edge, which you can also self-host.
If you'd rather not lock into any vendor, put flags behind OpenFeature. Unleash, Flagsmith, GrowthBook and others all have providers, so switching later is a config change, not a rewrite.
I don't know about first. Feature flags is somewhere down the list, behind email and comms and scheduling and todo's. AI can vibe code the shit out of a Todo app. Google Workspace wants $7/$14/or $22 per user per month. Times 50 or 100 people, that's not insignificant. Closely behind that there's the (financial) books. QuickBooks is the 800 lb gorilla of that industry and everyone just goes with them because book keepers know how to use them. There's no shortage of competition, especially AI competition to replace the human bookkeeper with an LLM. We'll just have to see where things go though.