I agree, but it's hard to get the nuances right. It's easy to roll out a feature to half of your user base. It's a bit harder to roll a feature out to half of users who are in a certain region, and have the flag be sticky on them.

We use Unleash at work, which is open source, and it works pretty well.

I generally agree, but see some more nuance. I think feature-flagging is an overloaded term that can mean two things.

First, my philosophy is that long-lived feature branches are bad, and lead to pain and risk once complete and need to be merged.

Instead, prefer to work in small, incremental PRs that are quickly merged to main but dormant in production. This ensures the team is aware of the developing feature and cannot break your in-progress code (e.g. with a large refactor).

This usage of "feature flags" is simple enough that it's fine and maybe even preferable to build yourself. It could be as simple as env vars or a config file.

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However, feature flagging may also refer to deploying two variants of completed code for A/B testing or just an incremental rollout. This requires the ability to expose different code paths to selected users and measure the impact.

This sort of tooling is more difficult to build. It's not impossible, but comparatively complex because it probably needs to be adjustable easily without releases (i.e. requires a persistence layer) and by non-engineers (i.e. requires an admin UI). This becomes a product, and unless it's core to your business, it's probably better to pick something off the shelf.

Something I learned later in my career is that measuring the impact is actually a separate responsibility. Product metrics should be reported on anyway, and this is merely adding the ability to tag requests or other units of work with the variants applied, and slice your reporting on it. It's probably better not to build this either, unless you have a niche requirement not served by the market.

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These are clearly two use cases, but share the overloaded term "feature flag":

1. Maintaining unfinished code in `main` without exposing it to users, which is far superior than long-lived feature branches but requires the ability to toggle.

2. Choosing which completed features to show to users to guide your product development.

(2) is likely better served by something off the shelf. And although they're orthogonal use cases, sometimes the same tool can support both. But if you only need (1), I wouldn't invest in a complex tool that's designed to support (2)—which I think is where I agree with you :)