LaunchDarkly gets $8.7M to put the right features in front of right users

>> overall organization structure is kinda messed up and they cannot convince development to do things right

That has nothing to do with why feature flags exist. No amount of planning or perfectly written software will give you insight into how your customers will react to your feature. I'd rather release something to 5% of my customers, see how it performs in the wild, make adjustments accordingly, and only then release it 100% along with any marketing initiatives that support it.

If teams use feature flags to release untested/unprepared code, that's their prerogative and is a perfectly acceptable use case if the business is amenable to those risks.

I've lost count over the years of how many features I've seen significantly modified after user feedback, or altogether cancelled because it was determined the long-term maintenance cost wouldn't be worth it vs. adoption/traction.

I think some of this reaction is because then someone from the non-engineering side of the business is like "let's use this" even though it's over-engineered for your use case (i.e. a one line if statement branching on a query parameters or something). Now I realize the platform they're providing is way more than that, and for advanced cases it would be totally valid (i.e. we only want to launch this for 10% of logged out North American users after Jan 1st).

For me, I think it's not so much NIH syndrome but resentment at pricing among analytics products that seems calibrated to extract as much value from the customer as possible, which they can do because there is so little direct competition and because the ROI is usually still positive.

It's a perfectly rational pricing strategy, of course, but it can sometimes feel like one of those economics experiments: "A colleague receives 100 dollars and is asked to split it between him and yourself. If you disagree with the split, neither of you gets anything. Your colleague proposes to give you 10 dollars and keep 90 himself. Do you choose to accept the 10 dollars, or would you prefer both of you get nothing?"

Also, your examples are about ancillary utilities, but let's say you're a data scientist and you decide to build your own A/B testing system instead of using one of the existing services out there. If you add up all the dev time and maintenance time the homegrown system will probably be way more expensive, but on the other hand building it might teach you a bunch of intangible skills that make you a better experimenter and that could be worth the expense if the company expects employees to stick around for a while.

Having said that, personally I still prefer to just pay for something. But I'm not at all stunned when other people do decide to roll their own tools.

It probably isn't targeted at those users. If you're a small shop and just need feature flags, this is probably overkill.

Recognize that there's a cost to pulling in 3rd party libraries, much less 3rd party services, into your project. It's not just the cost to integrate, but of figuring out failure modes. The offering can evolve to no longer serve your use case. They could deprecate the API, causing you to have to update current, and past, projects. Google can buy them and shut them down.

If you take this approach for everything someone has a SAAS for, you could spend more time responding to their changes than evolving your own product. Been there, done that - it isn't fun.

I'm working on that. Currently we are using LD but it's had some issues, enough that their CEO sent email and refunded some of our money.

As far as Scale is concerned we routinely see request timeout to LD and then suddenly a user loses a FF they previously had. Our cached value for the FF expires and then LD fails and then my customer is mad