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Not to take away from the fact that this is a very useful tool, but every time I have wanted this, I have built it myself. My general strategy is to store flags

Not to take away from the fact that this is a very useful tool, but every time I have wanted this, I have built it myself. My general strategy is to store flags in the user's data and for A/B testing, randomly assign A% of users to have a certain flag set. Then somewhere in the admin dashboard I'll drop a set of switches/buttons for activating flags and running A/B testing scripts. Collecting test results is simply modifying the database query to only include users that had the flag set. An external service for boolean flags seems a bit overkill to me. Edit: I read the first comment, looked at the features, and read the case studies: I am guilty of vastly oversimplifying what this does. The value proposition is still not right for my particular business, but at my previous job at Big Company, we had a custom rollout dashboard that didn't have most of these features (targeting groups, percentage rollout), and it still saved us many hours of development time.

WhitneyLand 10y ago
I hate to oversimplify something I don't know details on, but that's what popped into my mind as well. Just put an intern on it? Obviously is must be more impressive than it sounds - people wrote 9 million in checks.
slap_shot 10y ago
I saw this exact same sentiment when Optimizely was announced. Now, I cringe when people say they implemented their own A/B system (similar to what you wrote above). If you're running a business you probably need to spend your development efforts elsewhere.
- primitivesuave 10y ago
  In general, I'd say most tech businesses are aware of Optimizely and the value proposition is quite compelling. I certainly wouldn't try to save money on our Optimizely spend by building any part of their system myself. But if I could save the company $700/month (the price for 50k MAU, which doesn't even cover our requirements) by implementing something as simple as feature flags, I'd add it to our development roadmap. For smaller companies, ~$10k a year is not trivial. However, I acknowledge that I may be vastly oversimplifying, and am not knowledgeable enough about LaunchDarkly to speak so brazenly about how I could do it myself. My main point is that as a small web development company, we have this feature in our builds already, and it only cost us a couple hours of development time to implement it.
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- daveguy 10y ago
  Personally I think the most cringe worthy thing about optimizely is that they no longer have up front pricing. With frameworks that go far beyond AB testing for most backends why would you lock into something like optimizely: https://github.com/github/scientist https://github.com/github/scientist

WhitneyLand 10y ago

I hate to oversimplify something I don't know details on, but that's what popped into my mind as well. Just put an intern on it? Obviously is must be more impressive than it sounds - people wrote 9 million in checks.

slap_shot 10y ago

I saw this exact same sentiment when Optimizely was announced. Now, I cringe when people say they implemented their own A/B system (similar to what you wrote above). If you're running a business you probably need to spend your development efforts elsewhere.

primitivesuave 10y ago
In general, I'd say most tech businesses are aware of Optimizely and the value proposition is quite compelling. I certainly wouldn't try to save money on our Optimizely spend by building any part of their system myself. But if I could save the company $700/month (the price for 50k MAU, which doesn't even cover our requirements) by implementing something as simple as feature flags, I'd add it to our development roadmap. For smaller companies, ~$10k a year is not trivial. However, I acknowledge that I may be vastly oversimplifying, and am not knowledgeable enough about LaunchDarkly to speak so brazenly about how I could do it myself. My main point is that as a small web development company, we have this feature in our builds already, and it only cost us a couple hours of development time to implement it.
- deleted 10y ago
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daveguy 10y ago
Personally I think the most cringe worthy thing about optimizely is that they no longer have up front pricing. With frameworks that go far beyond AB testing for most backends why would you lock into something like optimizely: https://github.com/github/scientist https://github.com/github/scientist