LaunchDarkly is a hosted feature management platform operated by Catamorphic, Co., a Delaware corporation doing business as LaunchDarkly.[1] The Terms of Service describe the service as an online, cloud-based feature flag management solution made available on a subscription basis.[1] The vendor’s own pricing page presents a wider platform: feature flags, experimentation, session replay and other observability, and AgentControl for configuring and evaluating AI.[2]
LaunchDarkly is a software-as-a-service product, so there is no software licence to install and no perpetual licence. The Terms state that LaunchDarkly retains all rights to the service, the SDK and the documentation, and that the customer is not entitled to a copy of the underlying software or code.[1] The commercial question is what is measured and how much has been committed. Its documentation says that depending on the billing model a customer may be billed for more than one of the account usage metrics shown on the Usage page.[3]
Plans
The pricing page lists three plans.[2]
- Developer is free ($0 per month), with unlimited seats, no per-seat pricing, unlimited feature flags and limited monthly allowances. Pricing is based on usage, not per seat.
- Foundation is pay as you go after a 14-day trial, with no platform or seat fees, unlimited projects and environments, and billing per service connection and per 1k client-side MAU.
- Enterprise is custom-priced, with everything in Foundation plus items such as advanced targeting, custom roles and teams, workflows and approvals, release automation and SCIM provisioning.
Guardian is a paid add-on to Enterprise that adds release monitoring, guardrail metrics and automatic rollback, priced separately.[2] The detail is in LaunchDarkly plans, pricing and billing.
Metrics
LaunchDarkly meters different parts of the platform differently, which is the main source of confusion in a licence review.
- Server-side SDKs are measured in service connections: one instance of one server-side SDK connected to one environment, measured by connection time.[4]
- Client-side, AI and edge SDKs are measured in monthly active users, meaning unique context keys evaluated in a month. Server-side SDKs use service connections instead.[3]
- Members are measured in seats, defined as a licence for a single User to access the services.[1] The Developer plan lists unlimited seats.[2]
- Experimentation is billed by Experimentation keys or by Experimentation MAU, depending on the billing model.[3]
- AgentControl is billed by AI runs, counted each time a model is called or a judge runs.[3]
- Observability is billed by monthly ingested sessions, errors, traces and logs.[3]
- Data Export uses streaming Data Export events and is an add-on on select plans.[6][12]
Counting and floors
Subscribing to a plan means committing to a monthly entitlement for each relevant metric. The documentation states that a customer commits to a certain number of MAU each month and a certain number of service connections each month, and that usage over the prepaid entitlement is billed at the beginning of the next month.[3][4] LaunchDarkly also says it never stops or throttles service when a MAU limit is exceeded.[3] The free Developer plan is different. If its entitlements keep being exceeded, the plan converts to read-only mode.[3]
For some annual plans a “true forward” policy applies: if the customer consistently exceeds plan limits, averaged over a quarter, LaunchDarkly will true forward the contract based on actual average use.[3] See True forward policy.
Virtualization, serverless and deployment
Because service connections are time-based, there are explicit rules for dynamic infrastructure. A connection is counted over the minutes it exists, assuming 43,800 minutes per month, pre-production environments count, and serverless invocations are converted into fractions of a connection.[4] If the customer runs the Relay Proxy, LaunchDarkly bills based on the number of server-side SDKs connected to it.[4] Special rates are offered for architectures that create a high volume of server-side connections, such as Kubernetes, serverless, Python and Ruby.[2] See LaunchDarkly service connections and client-side MAU.
Programs and contract terms
The click-through Terms of Service cover Developer Tier and Foundation Self-Service customers and are effective September 8, 2025.[1] Customers with a Self-Service Starter or Pro subscription entered into before July 7, 2024 remain on archived terms until their subscription term ends, and an Enterprise Terms of Service updated October 27, 2022 sits in the archive.[1][9] The Terms limit use to the customer’s internal business purposes, bar reselling the service to third parties, bar use to build a competing product and bar circumventing a contractual usage limit.[1] Product-Specific Terms govern Session Replay and AI Features, and prevail over the Agreement in a conflict.[7] Support is delivered at four levels (Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum), and the self-service Terms provide Bronze.[1][8] See LaunchDarkly Terms of Service and support plans.
The pricing page states that SSO and SAML are included on every plan, while the SCIM documentation says SCIM is only available on an Enterprise plan.[2][11]
What to check in a LaunchDarkly review
- Identify which contract applies: self-service click-through terms, an archived pre-2024 self-service version or a negotiated Enterprise agreement.[1][9]
- Read the Plan usage page for each account, which shows seats, service connections, client-side MAU, Experimentation and streaming Data Export usage and what remains for the month.[6]
- Compare the entitlements on the Billing page with actual usage, noting that billing cycles begin on the first of the month (UTC) and that the first month is prorated.[5]
- Check SDK implementations. LaunchDarkly names incorrectly implemented SDKs, which should follow a singleton pattern, as a common cause of unexpected high bills.[3]
- Confirm which billing model applies to Experimentation, because the documentation offers two and tells customers to ask their representative which applies.[3]
The self-service Terms of Service reviewed for this article contain no clause allowing LaunchDarkly to audit the customer’s licence use, which LaunchDarkly meters itself. The audit clause found runs the other way: under the Data Processing Addendum, where data privacy laws require it, LaunchDarkly allows the customer or an appointed auditor to audit LaunchDarkly’s compliance.[10]
Out of scope
This article does not cover LaunchDarkly’s open source SDK licences, the Relay Proxy software licence or the Federal and EU instances, whose availability of features differs and is described in LaunchDarkly’s documentation.[5] Prices beyond those on the pricing page are not public.