YHK - yet another hacker news clone

We've built an open-source feature flag server for 11 years

15 points ivarconr 1 hour ago 6 comments

ivarconr 1 hour ago | parent

Hi HN, I'm Ivar, creator of Unleash.

Unleash started in 2014 as an internal tool at my company at the time, because we wanted to ship to production continuously without big-bang releases. It's an Open-Source feature flag platform with SDKs for >25 languages.

A few design choices that might be interesting:

- Local evaluation: server-side SDKs fetch the flag config and evaluate in-process, so user data never leaves your app and a flag check is a memory lookup, not a network call.

- Shared Rust engine (Yggdrasil): the evaluation logic is written once in Rust and embedded in the SDKs, so behaviour is the same across languages.

- Unleash Edge: a Rust proxy/cache for frontend and edge clients at scale. (Commercial)

- OpenFeature: supported if you don't want to lock into our SDKs.

yuppiepuppie 42 minutes ago | parent

Configuration as a Service companies must be a having a tough time these days...

I couldnt imagine a lot of teams are debating anymore whether to build their own or use an off the shelf product like this. The former being a straight forward task for an LLM. And the latter being a point of failure/attack for any one want to mess with the core foundations of a product.

leetrout 25 minutes ago | parent

At a certain scale (probably bimodal distribution) it makes sense to have a provider you can shrug it off to and point the finger to when things are missing features or the system goes down, etc etc. On the big-co end of that spectrum I think you are right and AI makes this stuff easy to launch internally.

The owner at my current gig has multiple times said "software is over" as it being a sort of gravy train of rent seeking. Products are gonna have to offer real / significant value to attract new customers. Maybe even to keep them, too...

gerardnico 18 minutes ago | parent

You miss where the value of software is nowadays. Just the hosting of this thing is worse to pay for.

0x70dd 18 minutes ago | parent

Yesterday I saw that LaunchDarkly is a $3B company. How crazy is that?!

notfried 7 minutes ago | parent

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 [*].

[*] I'm not affiliated with PostHog.