And even more so the ones that have room for brownfield expansion on the premises. Adding capacity to a site that is already zoned and permitted could be relatively easier.
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 [*].
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.
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.
Ex-LD engineer here. This was a classic mistake we saw most of our customers make, before they had to switch to LD or its competitors when they scaled a little bit more. Using a db is fine but can put heavy load on the server depending on the number of flags. In addition, it doesn't give you various features such as tagetting by users, segments, etc. Nor does it give you things like progressive rollout or automated rollback (yes we were using that in house and had saved us at least a few times).
I'm not advocating for LD, I'm advocating for any feature management system.
> In addition, it doesn't give you various features such as tagetting by users, segments, etc. Nor does it give you things like progressive rollout or automated rollback (yes we were using that in house and had saved us at least a few times).
These are things you can think of quite easily, or you just survey the landscape of what challenges other implementations run into and they inform you of this. The first iteration of our design had all of those; we could target users, always-subscribe internal users, we could have two features have the same segment/ordering of rollout, etc.
Database load wasn't ever a problem, because you're talking about quite literally a single SELECT on an already established & otherwise in use DB connection. But caching is not that much to bolt on afterwards should it become an issue.
It's never been clear to me that the simplicity of understanding that a single query has, even if it might be short a few features, is outweighed by the complexity of a full dependency to an external service.
As it was, our FF system outlived the company, and was sunset when the company ended.
Eh, I built a feature flagging system for service with millions of daily active users and it: wasn't hard to do, was easy to extend to support targeting, segments, and progressive rollout, and on top of it flags are easy to cache, so the database pressure was not that big. We did this long before LLMs, and it occupied maybe a month of engineering time for me, here and there as we needed new features, while I was doing other things. We did choose the wrong hash for bucketing in the beginning, but we noticed the stairstep patterns in our buckets quickly (an advantage of having millions of requests per day to measure) and picked a better one. It was much better this way since it meant backend flags without a roundtrip to a 3rd party service (that was the main motivation, we wanted this kind of control without adding latency to our requests). I remain baffled by launch darkly or other such services. And today, with LLMs, just build it yourself is hard to argue against.
As I mentioned, I'm not advocating for LD. I'm advocating for feature management systems (over env vars/db values and other similar naive implementations). The build vs buy is a separate argument.
> that was the main motivation, we wanted this kind of control without adding latency to our requests
Right, and most, if not all, off the shelf feature management systems have this problem solved already. For example LD uses a streaming architecture by default to push out flags to your application within 200ms, for client facing applications (android/ios/web), flags were retrieved once on load from a CDN, keeping the rest of your application snappy. I believe Unleash also has some sort of streaming architecture.
My website company 20 years ago was running Memcached keys for each of the feature flags so they only had to be loaded about once per session from the DB most of the time.
Scaling things like this is a mostly solved problem. Having your website load when the DB is down is not.
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.
I wonder if Anthropic would pull its IPO plan. Considering the past few weeks, this seems like the worst period they could go public in. Not that it may get any better, but perhaps OpenAI deciding to wait next year was more reasonable.
Do you think next year is going to be more favorable? I think investors are wondering where their money is and how anthropic plans to be sustainable long term.
But that's the same for every AI company
That bureaucracy is there for a reason, you often need bureaucracy to serve bureaucracy. About 85% of Microsoft's revenue comes from B2B/Enterprise/Governments. From their latest fiscal year report [1], the top 4 revenue groups were:
Server products & cloud services (39% of revenue)
M365 Commercial products & cloud services, excludes Consumer (30.7%)
Xbox / Gaming (6.6%)
LinkedIn (6%)
what about the kind of bureaucracy where it takes 10 people to do what 2 could get done in 30-40 hours of week? the kind where one engineer is digging the hole while the scrum master, project manager, program manager, swe manager, director, HR, business analyst look on?
That’s exactly the type of work you have to do to get government contracts. Think about a 200 page PDF which requires you to restate several dozen times what measures you have in place to make sure that the government customer won’t get hacked. For each question you have to go find some product requirements somewhere and find the place where it says “procedure for security audit.” Many of those people “looking on” are partly there to check boxes for enterprise or government contract purposes.
I’m not claiming this is the most efficient way to get any kind of code written. But if you want to have one hacker sit down and ship the whole product in a couple weeks without any of these business dorks disturbing them, well, that’s exactly what brand-new startups are for.
Meta will surely appeal, and will likely get the fine reduced to like 10% of that. But for comparison, in the recent multistate settlement over social media addiction by 47 states for $17 billion, there was a provision in that settlement to get $459 million [1] in exchange for releasing Meta from any state claims related to Cambridge Analytica. So those 47 states got $459 million for what New Mexico will likely get a few billion for.
Meta already got it to ~10%, but is trying to get it to ~1%. During the trial, it was determined that the total fine based on all violations to be $219B
MyFonts (I'm not affiliated to it) has a visual search for fonts, and searching for this design yields 94 results that are not identical but collectively share the same patterns. Now, fonts are horrible when it comes to licensing. Like, in this case, a font I picked has a 2M page view limit per month and you pay $660/year for that highest tier, so I get why a company would find a custom font a reasonable decision, visually and/or financially. But 4.5 years is absurd.
It makes sense they'd eventually do that. The Apple TV didn't launch with an App Store, and it took 8 years after its first generation to get an App Store! I'd guess Apple sees that most apps wouldn't make sense for the HomeView, and they'll likely restrict what categories of apps can launch on it.
Also all the developers are angry and trying to build for Duo right now that didn’t even give them a simulator in time, so makes sense to not rush this out right away.
For what it is worth, this seems to have a similar screen form factor to the expanded to Duo, so maybe they were waiting for this announcement before revealing the simulator to make it clearer that apps supporting one of the devices may support both? Not the first time Apple has made multi-device plays on a new form factor.
The HomeView has a 1:1 display, the Duo has 1:1.4 displays. Not really similar. Although I would expect any devs (had there been a SDK) to start with their iPad apps, which are expected to adapt to different window sizes.
Yeah the lack of an app store is fine for the first year.
But the requirement for everyone to have an ipad or iphone on 27.2 or later (for full functionality) seems more of a showstopper. I would have been in the market for one but haven’t even bothered to upgrade past iOS 18 yet.
> But the requirement for everyone to have an ipad or iphone on 27.2 or later (for full functionality) seems more of a showstopper. I would have been in the market for one but haven’t even bothered to upgrade past iOS 18 yet.
This is what irritates me about Parental Controls in 27. Everyone has to be on 27 or nobody gets the new controls. So, we still have a mini 5 that we let the littlest one on. It works, there's not reason to get a new one, but sure would be nice to have the newer Parental Controls for the older kids.
Part of Apple's whole appeal is that you get OS patches for a really long time. Outside of tech enthusiast circles, it's not that common to YOLO into bleeding-edge OS updates
It's hardly "YOLO into bleeding-edge OS updates" to run something more recent than a 2024 major release.
Anyway, I'm not criticizing. Run what you like! I just don't expect the overlap between "buys Apple device in entirely new category" and "running OS version from two years ago" to be very large.
> every user who still didn’t upgrade to 27 by now, has made an active choice to postpone the upgrade
Goodness no. Anyone who upgrades into a new major version before at least the .1 or .2 update is asking for a world of bugs, and is pretty much by definition an early adopter.
One issue with upgrading: macOS 27 doesn't run Xcode 26 which most developers probably want to continue using until they finish polishing the apps for Duo.
You're right, it is. But there's some annoying caveats. Parental Controls - every device has to be on 27 or nobody gets the updates. Have an iPad mini 5 that we let the youngest use, so that messes with everything.
No one with real money or power wants to cross OpenAI or Anthropic just yet. It's a closed ecosystem. OpenAI hacks HuggingFace, Nvidia soon after buys HuggingFace while it also before backed OpenAI. In the end, they just handle it all behind closed doors like family business.
I saw the landing page and I was like, "no way, Claude built that in real-time? Incredible." And then it loaded and it looked like a videogame from the 1990s. Pretty impressive for AI to have built it , and for something like that to run in the browser, but it's so clunky and ugly that I couldn't try it for more than a few seconds.
I hate it when products promise something so breathtaking in posters or trailers that is utterly detached from how the products looks or works. I might have tried it longer had that landing page not set this high of an expectation.
Overselling a product may getting you a higher conversion rate up to a point, but it will only hurt you and crater the rest of the funnel.
[1] https://eyesrhythm.com/refund/
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