I am on my second feature flag startup, but I also somewhat agree with this.

Every project should have flags, but many projects need just the basics and a service is overkill.

Rolling your own JSON still feels like something we ought avoid though. Yes to start out it’s 95% booleans. But then you want a rollout. And then you want some targeting rules. And then you want non booleans… maybe some json. Oo wouldn’t it be nice if the json could conform to a schema… and then eventually you are like damn I really want to change these without deploying. Or you want to read the same flag from multiple services.

I’ve tried to incorporate this lowest common denominator into https://quonfig.com Use it totally free & open source as SDK, and it’s just loading JSON that you can track in git. Agents love it, hot reloads, SDK in lots of languages. But vs rolling your own you’ve got a lot of headroom on the design. A bunch of targeting operators. Segments etc. And then if you do want to get a nice UI / delivery network for real time updates, then you can use the paid side of things.

Local use description: https://docs.quonfig.com/docs/how-tos/open-source-local

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quietbritishjim 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Your second startup dedicated to feature flags? Aren't these just some booleans with optional support to toggle them at runtime? Maybe I've just not been in the right domain, but I would have thought that if someone's use of feature flags is so complicated that they need a whole company to support it then they've massively overengineered their code.

	▲	gejose an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The author literally spells out why this isn't always the case: > Yes to start out it’s 95% booleans. But then you want a rollout. And then you want some targeting rules. And then you want non booleans… maybe some json. Oo wouldn’t it be nice if the json could conform to a schema… and then eventually you are like damn I really want to change these without deploying. Or you want to read the same flag from multiple services.
	▲	ambicapter 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Launchdarkly and Statsig are both well-established companies that basically do feature flags+add-ons.
	▲	aleksiy123 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		You can do much more with feature flags like ab testing/experiments, integrations with analytics. There can be whole UIs and tooling and infrastructure to manage around them and that’s what the sass offer
	▲	horizonwingtech 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[flagged]