Is LaunchDarkly free? What it actually costs in 2026

What the free tier actually includes

• —5 service connections
• —1,000 client-side monthly active users (MAU)
• —Unlimited seats and unlimited feature flags
• —100,000 experimentation MAU per month
• —5,000 AI runs per month
• —14 days of data retention

Where the wall is

The sixth service connection, or the 1,001st client-side user. A product with a web front end can outgrow 1,000 client-side MAU on its first day of real traffic.

After that: Foundation at $10 per service connection per month plus $8.33 per 1,000 client-side MAU per month, billed yearly, with a 14-day trial.

Can you self-host LaunchDarkly? No — cloud only

Every plan on LaunchDarkly's pricing page is a hosted subscription. The open-source feature-flag systems compared on this page are the self-hosted route.

What it actually takes to run one yourself

Real RAM against the documented minimum, monthly cost, setup time, and the one thing that catches people out.

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