Product Releases Should Not Be Scary

Every Product Manager and Software Developer should know that
pushing feature updates to production via traditional channels is
as archaic as painting on cave walls. The smart are always quick to
adapt to new, innovative technologies, and this mindset is exactly
what makes normal companies great.

The landscape is changing fast, especially in
IT. Change isn’t just necessary, but more often than not,
it’s the single-most-important variable that determines a company’s
chances of survival. The fact of the matter is that NOT
using Feature Flags leads to a more cumbersome, expensive, and
slower type of rollout.

Simply put, it makes your project less competitive with those
that have their deployments better organized, and that’s an
edge that you can’t afford to lose.

Feature Flags are changing how things work

Many companies are using Feature Flags these days, and
for good measure. It’s safer and allows for more granular
control over what you’re building. It almost always ends up saving
you money down the line, especially when calculating how many more
working hours your team would have to put in otherwise.

Messy deployments are a thing of the past for many companies
already, and it’s high time that your organization joins in on the
innovation as well.

ConfigCat is an
all-in-one hosted service solution for Feature Flag and
Configuration Management.^[1]

In a nutshell, ConfigCat is a company that seems to provide a
functional solution to everything that’s been described above. It
allows you to separate actual code deployments from feature
releases, as well as many other things.

You get control over nice things like easily turning
features on and off without actually touching code, the
ability to release changes to only certain chunks of your user
demographic, to do A/B tests on things before a mass rollout (to
see how those changes perform), and other juicy things of this sort
that would make any project manager sleep well at night.

What’s their deal, exactly?

Feature Flags aren’t by any means a new thing; they’ve actually
been around for quite a while now. In fact, I’d be hard-pressed to
find any companies worth their salt who don’t use Feature Flags, at
least to an extent. Facebook and Google are especially notorious
for their extremely slow phased rollout of new features.
Percentage-based rollouts like those would be a hellish task to
perform without Feature Flags.

While many tech giants use in-house solutions, small and medium
companies can’t afford such a luxury, because this would suck up
more resources and time than it would be feasibly practical for
them to invest in.

ConfigCat fills in this gap, presenting itself as a
complete feature flag as a service^[2]
solution. They stand distinctly from other feature management
solutions due to their no-compromise approach to
security (which many other companies in this field have it
locked under either a paywall or a premium tier option of some
sort).

Zoltán Dávid, one of the company’s founders, even firmly touted
on multiple occasions that “security should never cost extra
money.” Here’s hoping that we see more of this mindset from other
companies in 2021 and onwards as well.

The fairness approach

Let’s get one thing straight. There are many other players out
there that offer Feature Flag solutions, LaunchDarkly being one of
them. As it stands, ConfigCat seems to firmly be placing itself as
a solid LaunchDarkly alternative, more than anything else. A more
“lightweight LaunchDarkly” variant that wants to shine as an
immensely more cost-effective, but which provides “90% of the power
with only 10% of the complexity” kind of deal.

Pricing

Pricing is yet another area where ConfigCat stands
out. While many companies seem to do their best to lock
you into their most pricey subscription tiers, ConfigCat almost
insists that you don’t pay a nickel more than you need to.

Like most feature flag as a service platform out there, they
operate through monthly subscriptions. The one thing that you
should keep an eye on is the number
of monthly config.json downloads^[3]
that your traffic generates, as this would determine which
subscription would best fit your needs. Objectively speaking, this
is a nice approach that allows you to foresee and transparently
calculate costs beforehand, based on your actual traffic, and
without any annoying paywalls forcing your hand.

Forever Free Plan

That being said, they hardly restrict you with anything else in
most other subscription tiers. Even with their cheapest
subscription plan (which you can check out here^[4]), you get a boatload of
nice things like unlimited team member seats, unlimited monthly
active users, uncrippled security, and many other goodies that you
won’t see at most other competitors.

To top it all off, there’s even a very generous FOREVER FREE
plan that fresh start-ups and beginners companies can use.