Your LaunchDarkly Renewal Just Came In. You're Probably Furious.
You're not alone. The median LaunchDarkly customer pays $71,847 per year, and renewal quotes commonly arrive 1.5–2× higher than last year's contract.
No credit card. Free until you're fully migrated off LaunchDarkly. We mean it.
You Didn't Make a Bad Decision. The Pricing Model Changed Under You.
When your team first adopted LaunchDarkly, the math probably made sense. Feature flags for a handful of engineers, a predictable bill, a product that worked. You built on top of it. You shipped faster. It became infrastructure.
Then the bill grew.
LaunchDarkly has restructured its pricing at least three times since 2022, from per-user to "Monthly Context Instances" to "Monthly Active Users" to the current dual-metric model: $12 per service connection per month, plus $10 per 1,000 client-side MAUs, plus add-ons for experimentation ($3/1K MAU), session replays ($3.50/1K sessions), and more. Each rename was presented as a clarification. Each one made the total cost harder to predict.
A 30-engineer team with 30 service connections and 500,000 client-side MAUs is looking at a Foundation-tier bill of approximately $5,660/month, $67,920/year, before experimentation add-ons. That's before the renewal conversation, which Vendr's dataset shows commonly arrives at 1.5–2× last year's contract citing a "legacy plan migration."
The hostage dynamic is real. One Redditor put it plainly: "While their product is great, it makes you their hostage. They can literally demand any amount of money and your alternative is having your own SaaS product break."
That's the trap. You didn't build on LaunchDarkly because you were naive. You built on it because it was the right call at the time. The switching cost, your SDK integrations, your flag configurations, your team's mental model, is what keeps you paying.
We built ShipSilently to be the off-ramp. Not a weekend hack. Not another vendor that'll do the same thing in three years. A flat-priced, edge-native flag service with a professional migration team that will move you off LaunchDarkly for free and not charge you a dollar until you're fully migrated and running clean.
The teams that have moved spent roughly a weekend on the switch. Some did it in a day. If you want the step-by-step technical walkthrough, our migrate from LaunchDarkly guide covers the SDK swap in detail.
What You're Actually Paying vs. What You Should Be
LaunchDarkly bills on two meters: service connections and monthly active users. Enter yours below for a like-for-like comparison. Not sure how many service connections you have? Here's how to count them.
Their best-case quote, but it locks you into a one-year contract paid up front. ShipSilently stays month-to-month: cancel any time.
Advanced: estimate your billable evaluations
We don't bill connections. The billable event is one evaluation: an API request for a flag decision. That happens on each client load, each serverless pull, or as updates arrive over an SSE connection. Pro includes 10M evaluations/month; beyond that it's $0.01 per 10,000.
Estimated usage: ~10M evaluations / month, within the Pro included amount.
- Service connections: 30 × $12 × 12 $4,320
- MAU: 500 × $10 × 12 $60,000
- Annual prepay + 30% discount −$0
- Flat plan: $49 × 12 months $588
- Service connections: 30 × $0 $0
- Evaluations: ~10M/mo (10M incl.) $0
| Metric | LaunchDarkly | ShipSilently |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Per service connection + per MAU + add-ons | $49/mo flat, billed per edge evaluation, $0 per connection |
| Median annual contract (196 purchases) | $71,847/yr | $588/yr ($49 × 12 months) |
| Seats | Restricted, cost per seat | Unlimited, always |
| Service connections | $12/connection/month | $0, we never bill connections |
| MAU charges | $10 per 1,000 users | None |
| Experimentation add-on | $3 per 1,000 MAU extra | Included |
| Renewal surprise | Common (1.5–2× quotes documented) | $49. Same as last month. |
| Relay Proxy (to reduce billing) | Enterprise plan only | Not needed |
| Contract lock-in | 1-year minimum, 60-day cancellation notice | Month-to-month |
| Migration support | None | Free, handled by us |
"One team we've spoken to was paying $72,000/year for LaunchDarkly and moved to a service with better evaluation latency running at $588/year. The migration took a weekend."
Why we charge $0 per service connection
A "service connection" is just a long-running, open GET request, an SDK
holding a streaming HTTP connection so it can receive flag updates. It sits there idle
almost all the time. Maintaining one costs essentially nothing, so charging $12/month
for each one is a billing decision, not an infrastructure cost.
We don't bill connections at all. The billable event is an evaluation: an API request for a flag decision, whether that's a client load, a serverless pull, or an update over an SSE connection. Pro includes 10M evaluations a month; past that it's $0.01 per 10,000. So open as many connections as you want, and if you don't need real-time, polling makes even the evaluation count cheaper.
New to the term, or trying to forecast your own bill? Read: what is a LaunchDarkly service connection, and how to count yours.
You're Not Building Your Own. You Tried That.
There's a version of this story where your team seriously considered building an internal feature flag system. Maybe you even got a few sprints in. Env vars wired to a database, a simple admin panel, a Slack command to toggle things.
It works. Until it doesn't.
No real-time push. No percentage rollouts. No audit log. No kill switch that fires in under a second. No one to call at 2am when something breaks. And now you've got an undocumented internal tool that only two engineers understand, and one of them is leaving.
So you went back to LaunchDarkly. Or you stayed. Because the alternative was building something you didn't want to build and maintaining something you didn't want to own.
That's the gap we sit in. Between "we'll build it ourselves" and "we'll pay whatever LaunchDarkly charges." Between homegrown hell and enterprise pricing shock.
ShipSilently is managed infrastructure. We run it, maintain it, scale it, and keep it online. You get a flag dashboard your PM can actually use, SSE real-time updates so kill switches fire in under a second, and evaluation that runs on Cloudflare's 300-city edge network, not a regional data center that goes down when AWS US-East-1 has a bad day.
(LaunchDarkly went down in October 2025 when AWS US-East-1 had an outage. Teams couldn't update or create flags. Production incidents lasted longer than they should have. Edge-native evaluation doesn't have this failure mode.)
$49/month. Unlimited seats. No MAU charges. No per-connection fees. No renewal conversation.
We'll Migrate You. Free. And You Don't Pay Until You're Fully Off LaunchDarkly.
Migration is the switching cost that keeps teams stuck. Here's how we remove it entirely.
When you start a migration with ShipSilently, here's what happens:
-
Step 1: Flag inventory (Day 1)
We export your complete LaunchDarkly flag configuration via API, every flag, every rule, every segment, every environment. We review it with you and build the migration map.
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Step 2: Parallel run (Days 2–5)
We import your flags into ShipSilently and run both systems simultaneously. Your LaunchDarkly SDK keeps working. ShipSilently runs alongside it. No production risk.
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Step 3: SDK swap (Days 3–7)
We provide SDK replacement code for your stack, JavaScript, TypeScript, Go, Python, Ruby, Java. The API surface is intentionally similar. Most teams complete this in one sprint. The full SDK reference lives in our docs.
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Step 4: Cutover and verification (Day 7–14)
We verify flag parity, run your staging environment on ShipSilently only, and sign off with you. Then we cut production.
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Step 5: You cancel LaunchDarkly
We'll help you draft the cancellation email too. Remember: 60 days notice required.
The billing terms: You do not pay ShipSilently until the day you cancel your LaunchDarkly contract. We want to earn your business by proving the product works, not by locking you into two contracts simultaneously.
What You Won't Miss
- The "service connections" billing line you had to explain to your CFO
- MAU overages on a product with no anonymous users (yes, this happens)
- Sharing dashboard credentials because seat costs made access impossible
- Renewal proposals that arrive at 2× last year's contract
- The Relay Proxy you had to deploy to reduce your own bill
- Flags that can't be updated when AWS US-East-1 goes down
- Custom attributes you have to resupply on every single SDK call
- Environment drift between staging and production causing 2am incidents
- A 60-day cancellation notice window you didn't know existed until it was too late
What ShipSilently Is
Edge-Native Evaluation
Every flag evaluation runs on Cloudflare’s global network, 300+ cities, sub-5ms latency. Not a regional data center. Not a single point of failure.
Real-Time Kill Switches
SSE push means flag changes propagate in under a second. No polling. No stale state. Your kill switch fires when you need it to.
Unlimited Seats, Always
Your PM, your QA lead, your on-call engineer, your CEO. All of them. Same price. $49. No seat math required.
One Line on Your Credit Card
$49. That’s the bill. No service connection line items, no MAU overages, no experimentation surcharges. One number.
We Handle the Migration
Professional migration support, flag import tooling, SDK replacement code. Free. Done before you pay us a dollar.
Eval Analytics Included
See which flags are firing, for whom, and when. Stale flag detection built in. We alert you before flags become debt.
Questions Teams Ask Before They Switch
How long does the migration actually take?
Most teams complete the full switch in 3–7 business days. The parallel-run approach means your LaunchDarkly setup keeps working throughout. The longest part is usually the SDK code changes, which take 1–2 engineering sprints depending on how many services use flags. We’ve seen teams do it in a single day.
What happens to flags with complex targeting rules?
We import your flags and rules via the LaunchDarkly API and map them to ShipSilently’s targeting model. Percentage rollouts, user attribute targeting, named segments, all supported. We review the migration map with you before anything touches production. If you have edge cases, we handle them manually.
Which SDKs does ShipSilently support?
JavaScript/TypeScript (browser and Node.js), Go, and Python are in production. React-specific hooks included. Additional languages are in development. If your stack isn’t listed, email us, we’ll tell you honestly whether we can support your migration timeline.
Do I really not pay until I cancel LaunchDarkly?
Yes. We don’t start billing you until your LaunchDarkly cancellation is confirmed. We’re not interested in running two simultaneous contracts against you. The offer is real because we’re confident the product will earn the business.
How do I negotiate a lower LaunchDarkly renewal while I evaluate alternatives?
Use competitive quotes as leverage. Get a ShipSilently quote (or just reference our public $49/month pricing) in writing, then bring it to your LaunchDarkly AE. Vendr data shows buyers who cite named alternatives in active evaluation commonly achieve 20% additional discounts beyond standard negotiation. The 60-day cancellation window is also a negotiation lever, mention you’re aware of it and intend to use it if pricing can’t be resolved.
What if LaunchDarkly has features we depend on that ShipSilently doesn’t?
We’ll tell you honestly. Book a call, describe your flag setup, and we’ll give you a straight answer about parity. Features on our current roadmap: approval workflows, multi-variate flag support beyond boolean, audit log export. If you need something we don’t have, we’d rather tell you now than waste both our time.
Is ShipSilently reliable enough to replace LaunchDarkly in production?
ShipSilently runs on Cloudflare Workers + KV, the same infrastructure that serves hundreds of billions of requests per day globally. Flag evaluation is edge-native: it doesn’t route through a central server that can go offline. LaunchDarkly’s October 2025 outage (caused by AWS US-East-1) is structurally not possible with our architecture.
What does “unlimited seats” actually mean?
Everyone in your organization can have a ShipSilently account. Developers, PMs, QA, customer success, your CEO, your contractors. No per-seat charge, no read-only tier distinction, no shared-credential workarounds. $49 covers your whole team.
Your Next Renewal Quote Doesn't Have to Be a Surprise
If your LaunchDarkly renewal is in the next 90 days, now is the right time to start the conversation. The migration takes less than a week. You don't pay until you're done. And $49/month is a line item your CFO won't ask about twice.
No credit card required · Free professional migration · Cancel anytime · Runs on Cloudflare's global network