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by huhtenberg 3209 days ago
Oy vey.

What is the problem that you solve that would justify adding a dependency on an external service that shims itself between us and our precious users?

Rolling out features to subsets of users in a controlled fashion... it's just a such damn trivial thing to do.
2 comments
dguo 3209 days ago
It's only trivial when your needs are trivial. See https://launchdarkly.com/buildbuy.html

At scale, a hosted solution might be justified.

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edoceo 3209 days ago
Many (most?) people are not at that kind of scale, and LD is only at scale as the sum of 1000s of small sites + a few big ones.

After using LD for a year I found it expensive, slow, broken. They were cool and gave me a large credit.

Now I use a self-hosted "microservice" which works at our scale (100s of users).

Feature Flags are only checked on sign in here, so the load on our service is very low.

But is in go, which is "fast" and web-scale, right?

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kristianc 3208 days ago
Wow, $79-300 a month is expensive for a feature like that. Not sure who they're targeting at a price point like that - many who can cough up a budget like that for a small point solution are going to have the capacity to build their own.
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paulddraper 3208 days ago
split.io is several times that.

IDK about this product, but split.io has more features and better UI than you could get from a handful of engineers working part-time.

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huhtenberg 3208 days ago
If one is "at scale", they will have enough in-house resources to implement this by themselves.
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dguo 3208 days ago
That doesn't mean they will though. Companies frequently make the decision to buy services that they could build instead. I'm not saying every one should be paying for feature flagging, just that it could make sense for some companies.
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breakthesystem 3209 days ago
Depending on your target platform, you might not have as much control over your releases. On the web, it's easy, but on e.g. iOS, it gets a bit harder.

I agree: like error reporting, it's not a hard, unsolvable problem, but it's a problem I had a few times and decided, why reimplement the wheel I could create a helpful open source solution?

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