Currently, my main use case for LaunchDarkly is as a consumer. The application that I'm using uses LaunchDarkly as feature toggles. We toggle our flags on and off depending on what environment they're in, and depending on what state of the application's development lifecycle is.

I can give a specific example of how I use LaunchDarkly for feature toggles in my application. We've got a set of features that we're keeping hidden behind a set of feature toggles, specifically based on how we're allowing users to log into our application. When the feature toggle is on, the functionality allows the user to access the new identity provider that we're using. When the feature toggle is off, it's using our old, previous functionality for our identity provider.

LaunchDarkly offers several outstanding features. There's the main functionality of LaunchDarkly, which is providing feature toggle functionality. They also provide a relay proxy, which allows us to increase performance, as well as provide functionality for our feature toggles in the event that connections to LaunchDarkly go down. Some of the more impressive and useful functionality are the targeted feature toggling, as well as different segments that allow very specific targeting of users and context, with the ability to get very granular and complex with feature toggling rules. Additional functionalities include the ability to see how feature toggles are being utilized, how often they're being evaluated, as well as a scanner that helps users determine which flags can be retired and which flags still need to be used.

These features in my current project have helped my team because they allow us to specifically target users to start turning on functionality. We can monitor the behavior and make sure that it's behaving as expected when the feature toggle is turned on, and then we can increase the usage. In previous projects, we've also used the targeting and the segments in a similar fashion, and we could target it towards both internal and external customers based on the context being passed to LaunchDarkly as it's evaluating the flags.

I wish we were using more targeting in our feature toggles and I wish we were using more feature toggles as well as feature toggle dependencies. Making one feature toggle or one set of feature toggles dependent on another one would allow us to turn them all on or turn them all off at one time.

For improvements in LaunchDarkly, managing team members and access to those team members was challenging. We could add team members through Terraform and do it programmatically, and then modify it through the user interface. However, once we started modifying things through the interface, we weren't able to go back to using any configuration programmatically for the team members. It made it challenging to orchestrate team member management. The other aspect I wasn't particularly fond of was when they started adding AI to the interface and deployment interface. It reminded me of old school wizards when installing software and simplified the interface too much, removing some of the engineering control I preferred.

I have been using LaunchDarkly for about the last three or four years.

LaunchDarkly is incredibly stable in my experience.

I can't say for certain about LaunchDarkly's scalability with my current organization. However, in my previous organization, it handled scaling excellently.

I have not interacted with the customer support team at my current organization. However, at my previous organization, I interacted with them quite frequently, and they were absolutely great. They were stellar, super polite, super fast, and usually really knowledgeable.

I would rate the customer support a nine because there were a couple of times where we got handed off to junior support techs who didn't fully understand what I was asking.

Positive

I did not use a previous solution at either of these organizations. At my previous organization, there was a homegrown solution and by the time I left that organization, we were in the process of transitioning them from the homegrown solution to LaunchDarkly. The reason they wanted to get off of the homegrown solution was because it had become too large and too complex and too difficult to maintain.

For my current organization, I can't say one way or the other about return on investment. I've never had a challenge getting access except for team member configuration. At my previous organization, we were having issues due to licensing costs and agreements. We were eventually able to get it to a point where a very small team could administer access to LaunchDarkly for thousands of employees. The pain point of configuring the basic configuration using Terraform came into play, allowing us to hand off the management of LaunchDarkly teams to the development teams so they could handle permissions as long as we set out a set of permissions they could choose from. That made things easier. However, that's where we started experiencing the pain point of once things started getting modified through the dashboard, we couldn't get them back via Terraform.

At my current organization, I have no experience with licensing and setup cost. However, at my previous organization, I wasn't making any decisions but got some visibility into the pricing and usage. That organization was incredibly large, and we had an incredibly high usage rate, so we were getting some custom pricing.

Before choosing LaunchDarkly at my current organizations, I was not involved in those processes. For some of the smaller organizations and startups I've been working with, we have been looking at other possible solutions. Unleashed is one of them, and I think that's the one I'm leaning towards. I'm not particularly enthusiastic about their functionalities. However, they tend to come at the right price point that I need.

If you can afford it, go for LaunchDarkly. It's a great tool. I really enjoy using it. I wish there was a lower tier for startups and small companies. On a scale of 1-10, I rate LaunchDarkly an 8.