Is LaunchDarkly free? What it actually costs in 2026
Yes, there is a free tier — with limits.
LaunchDarkly moved off per-seat pricing and now bills on a dual meter: roughly $10 per service connection plus about $8.33 per 1,000 client-side monthly active users. Seats are unlimited on every tier, which is a genuine improvement — but the meters mean a consumer app with a large user base can pay substantially more than it did before, while a small team with many microservices pays on connections. There is a free tier for small use. Figures checked 2026-07-31; this pricing changed recently, so confirm against LaunchDarkly's current page before modelling it.
When paying is still the right call
Stay if you run real experiments rather than just toggles — LaunchDarkly's experimentation and statistics engine is ahead of everything open here, and rebuilding it is not a weekend. Stay if you need enterprise governance: approval workflows, change requests, SOC 2 and a support contract with consequences. Stay if flags are load-bearing for compliance or incident response, where an SLA on the flag service is the thing you are actually buying. And stay if your volume is small enough that the free tier covers it, which is more teams than expect it.
What you are locked into
Moderate, and falling fast because of OpenFeature. Historically the hook was the SDK: flags evaluated through LaunchDarkly's client meant swapping vendors meant touching every call site. OpenFeature — a CNCF standard with provider implementations for most of this category, LaunchDarkly included — makes the evaluation API vendor-neutral, so the switch becomes a provider swap at startup. What still does not move is everything around the flags: targeting rules, segment definitions, experiment history and the audit trail, none of which export in a form another platform ingests.
If you would rather not pay: Unleash
Unleash
The most complete open feature-flag platform, and it self-hosts properly.
Open-source server free and self-hostable. Hosted and enterprise tiers are paid.
See all 5 LaunchDarkly alternatives comparedCompare the free options head-to-head
Pricing is verified against the vendor's published figures and dated above. Vendors change prices — confirm current numbers with LaunchDarkly before you commit. More feature flags & experimentation decisions on Macrostack.