Smarter feature toggles and user segmentation SAAS

Hi folks,

I have one idea that I want to share with the community to get feedback. Lately, I was thinking a lot about SAAS for the feature toggles and user segments.

I want to build a service that will provide API to evaluate features dynamically, so that feature flag will be aware of the calling context and can execute custom logic remotely on my service. Feature toggle itself would be configured in the platform.

I had experience working in a gaming industry where we usually had features that were based on user levels, tiers, experience, balance, etc. Feature flag or the segment was a piece of executable(interpretable) code like the following:

feature Id 504:

user.level > 500 && inList("VipUsers") && user.balance < 50 000

and we were able to just to call it by id

if (segmentation.isEnabled(504, userContext)){
    . . . custom logic
}

Also, there will be some basic analytics built around that.

I did some research and I know that there are solutions like that out there. Just to list a few:

• Firebase
• Launchdarkly
• Optimizely
• Rollout io
• Featureflags io
• Heap io
• Bullet-train io

What strikes me most about all the above:

1. Pricing

• It's usually overpriced (like 70$ for a solo developer for 2k MAU in Rollout IO and Launch Darkly). I don't think that a solo developer with 2k MAU will ever pay 70$ for this kind of thing. Team of 5 is around 300$ a month, which is overkill as well IMHO.

• It's blurry and unclear with the "Contact Sales" option (Optimizely).

2. How primitive feature toggles are

• I'm able to come up with many scenarios when actual smart feature toggle (or user segment) is needed then just plain "true/false" or "10% of IPad users" is needed, which is common for the most of them. Look at the example at the beginning of the post.

There are some open source solutions and maybe some of them even have the option of code interpretation. But, as usual, it comes with the cost of maintaining hardware and software bu yourself and most of us don't bother with that as well.

I was also thinking to nice down the solution to the Game Industry (Mobile gaming, Facebook games) where we have mid-range studios that can afford few bucks a month on nice dynamic feature toggles and analytics.

So now I'm here asking for your opinion guys. Does it have chance to fly? Does it worth to spend any effort on?