--- title: "Feature Flag Pricing in 2026: What You'll Actually Pay | Betterflag" description: "A comparison of feature flag pricing in 2026: LaunchDarkly MAUs and service connections, PostHog per request, seat-priced clouds, and one-meter evaluation billing." canonical: https://betterflag.app/blog/feature-flag-pricing-2026 source: https://betterflag.app/blog/feature-flag-pricing-2026 --- # Feature Flag Pricing in 2026: What You'll Actually Pay **Published:** 2026-08-22 **Author:** Mehdi **Tags:** feature-flags, pricing, launchdarkly, comparison, alternatives Feature flag pricing is hard to Google because every vendor meters a different thing. Seats. Client-side MAUs. Service connections. Flag requests. "Contact sales." Two quotes for the same team can differ by 10x and both be "correct" on the pricing page. I am building [Betterflag](/), so this is not a neutral buyer's guide. It is the teardown I wanted when I was the buyer. Numbers below are published list prices as of mid-2026. Verify before you sign. Side-by-sides live on [/vs](/vs). ## The meters, in one place | Meter | What grows the bill | Who uses it | |---|---|---| | **Seats** | Hiring, plus anyone who needs to see a rollout | GrowthBook Cloud Pro ($40/seat), older enterprise SKUs | | **Client-side MAUs** | Your product succeeding | LaunchDarkly ($8.33–$10 per 1,000 MAUs) | | **Service connections** | Each SDK instance × environment (pods, workers, serverless) | LaunchDarkly (~$10 per connection / mo) | | **Flag requests** | Every evaluation that hits their API | PostHog (after 1M free), Flagsmith | | **Evaluations (one meter)** | Flag decisions served | Betterflag ($9.99 / 1M, $24.99 / 5M, $99.99 / 50M) | | **Events** | Analytics around the flags | Statsig (flag checks free; events metered) | | **Your time** | Upgrades, uptime, SDKs | Any self-hosted OSS | If the meter is not the thing that costs the vendor money, you are paying for a proxy. Evaluations are the thing that costs money. MAUs and seats are easier to sell. I argued this at more length in [why LaunchDarkly bills your architecture](/blog/launchdarkly-service-connections). ## Worked example: 10 people, 25k MAU, ~5M evaluations Assumptions: a consumer app, 5 backend services, staging + production, 25,000 monthly active users, flags on the main flows. We use ~200 evaluations per MAU per month as a planning number (page loads plus API checks). 25k × 200 = 5M evaluations. If you cache aggressively, you will be lower. If you evaluate on every render, you will be higher. | Tool | What you pay (list, monthly) | Notes | |---|---|---| | **LaunchDarkly Foundation** | ~$50 connections + ~$250 MAUs ≈ **$300** | 5 services as 5 connections; MAUs dominate. [Full vs](/vs/launchdarkly) | | **PostHog flags** | **~$235** after the free 1M | Local evaluation can cut this. [Full vs](/vs/posthog) | | **GrowthBook Cloud Pro** | **$400** | 10 × $40 seats. Self-host is $0 + ops. [Full vs](/vs/growthbook) | | **Flagsmith Start-Up** | **$45** base, then expensive overage; 3-seat cap | 5M requests is a lot of overage at $7/100k. [Full vs](/vs/flagsmith) | | **Statsig** | Flag checks free; Pro from **$150** if you need team features | Buy it for experiments. [Full vs](/vs/statsig) | | **Betterflag Launch** | **$24.99** | 5M evaluations included, unlimited seats | This is why "how much do feature flags cost" has no one-line answer. The same job is $25 or $400 depending on whether you are buying seats, MAUs, or evaluations. Scale the app to **100k MAU** (~20M evaluations). LaunchDarkly MAU line alone is about $833–$1,000/mo. Betterflag's cheapest bill is Launch plus 15M overage at $84.99/mo, not the $24.99 included price. Scale is $99.99 if you want 50M included. That gap is the commercial argument. Do the evaluation math. ## Honest cases where you should not buy Betterflag **You already pay for PostHog analytics and stay under 1M flag requests.** Flags are effectively free. Stay. Move later if volume grows. **You run a real experimentation program.** Statsig's stats engine is excellent. Flags ride along. Betterflag will not grow a CUPED implementation to win you. **You must self-host.** Unleash, Flagsmith, GrowthBook. We are hosted-only. That is a real requirement for some teams, and it is a door we do not open. **You are a 500-engineer org with a platform team and a compliance matrix.** LaunchDarkly is built for you. You are not overpaying for a boolean. You are paying for a vendor that looks like the rest of your stack. ## How to forecast any vendor's bill 1. Pick the meter. If there are two, budget both at 3× current traffic. 2. Count **service connections** honestly: services × environments, including preview if they bill those. 3. Convert MAU to evaluations if you are comparing to an evaluation-priced tool. 100–300 evaluations per MAU per month is a sane band for an app that flags main flows. Publish the conversion next to the quote so nobody can accuse you of a trick. 4. Ask what an agent or a CI job costs. If the answer is a seat, the model predates your workflow. 5. Ask where the [audit log](/blog/launchdarkly-audit-log-enterprise), approvals, and SCIM live. If the answer is "Enterprise, custom," your kill switch has an upsell. ## One meter, on purpose [Betterflag pricing](/pricing) is evaluations only. Unlimited flags, seats, environments on every tier. Starter $9.99/mo (1M), Launch $24.99 (5M), Scale $99.99 (50M), overage published at $5 / $4 / $3 per extra 1M. No MAU math, no connection audit, no seat spreadsheet. Use the [bill calculator](/calculator) to convert your MAU and services into both meters. The conversion (200 evaluations per MAU by default) is on the page so nobody can accuse the quote of a trick. Alpha waitlist members lock in 50% off for life. That is the deal while we are pre-launch. [Compare vendors](/vs) if you want the long tables. Come back to this post when a pricing page has four asterisks and a "talk to sales" where the number should be. ## FAQ ### How much do feature flags cost in 2026? It depends on the meter. LaunchDarkly bills service connections plus client-side MAUs. PostHog bills flag requests after a free 1M. GrowthBook Cloud Pro bills $40 per seat. Flagsmith bills requests and seats. Betterflag bills evaluations only, from $9.99/mo for 1M. For a typical startup, the range is about $10/mo to several hundred, not including enterprise quotes. ### Why is LaunchDarkly more expensive than other feature flag tools? LaunchDarkly meters architecture and success: every service connection and every client-side MAU. A 100k-MAU app is hundreds to thousands per month in MAU charges alone, before enterprise add-ons. Tools that meter evaluations or include flags in a suite price the same job very differently. ### What is the cheapest feature flag service? Self-hosted open source (Unleash, Flagsmith, GrowthBook) is cheapest in cash and most expensive in time. Among hosted flags-only tools, look at the meter: a $9.99 plan with 1M evaluations is cheaper than a $45 plan with 1M requests and 3 seats, and much cheaper than MAU billing at any real traffic. Suites like PostHog can be free if you already pay for analytics and stay under the flag free tier. ### Does Betterflag charge per seat or per MAU? Neither. Every Betterflag tier has unlimited flags, seats, and environments. The only meter is flag evaluations: $9.99/mo for 1M, $24.99 for 5M, $99.99 for 50M, with published overage. Alpha waitlist members lock in 50% off for life.