You are not alone. LaunchDarkly is designed for enterprise budgets. If you are a startup or small team, there is a simpler option.
LaunchDarkly Pro is $10/seat/mo. For a 10-person engineering team, that is $100/mo just for feature flags. Enterprise pricing is negotiated and typically higher.
For an enterprise team with a large budget and complex requirements, LaunchDarkly is probably worth it. For everyone else, the math does not work.
Salt Lick is a self-hosted feature flags tool. Single Go binary, embedded SQLite, running in 30 seconds. Free tier: 10 flags. Pro: $0.99/mo/mo.
curl -fsSL https://stockyard.dev/saltlick/install.sh | sh
| Salt Lick | LaunchDarkly | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | $0.99/mo/mo flat | $10/seat/mo |
| Hosting | Self-hosted | Cloud only |
| Free tier | 10 flags | Limited |
| Setup time | 30 seconds | Account + config |
| Dependencies | None (single binary) | N/A (managed) |
| Data location | Your server | Their cloud |
Salt Lick has a smaller SDK ecosystem (Go, JS, Python vs 25+ languages). It does not have approval workflows, change management, or audit trails at the enterprise level. If your compliance team requires SOC 2 Type II certification from your flag vendor, LaunchDarkly provides that.
Free tier included. No credit card required.
LaunchDarkly's Starter plan costs $10 per seat per month. At 10 engineers, that is $100 per month for boolean toggles. The Pro plan — required for targeting rules and metrics — costs $20 per seat. A 25-person engineering team pays $500 per month for the ability to turn features on and off without deploying. The functionality itself is straightforward: check a flag key, get a boolean, branch your code. The value LaunchDarkly provides is the management layer around that check, but $500 per month buys a lot of management layer.
Salt Lick provides flag evaluation through a single HTTP endpoint. Your application checks /api/flags/evaluate?key=new-checkout and gets a boolean. No SDK, no client library, no LaunchDarkly-specific code in your application. The flag evaluation adds single-digit milliseconds of latency. Toggle flags through the dashboard or the API. The total cost is the compute to run a single process — typically a $5 per month VPS — regardless of how many engineers check flags.