Show HN: We built an open-source LaunchDarkly alternative for B2Bs (enrolla.io)
After 15 years of working together at various companies, where we rebuilt the same SaaS foundation layer again and again - we wanted to create something reliable and feature-rich that will be available for everyone. We now have a backoffice UI, a backend and SDKs for managing customer features and a way to manage pricing tiers on top of it. We plan to add more features around metering and integration with Stripe, so that ideally Enrolla can be used to bootstrap any new SaaS software in minutes.
We’ve launched this repo under the MIT license so any developer can use it. The goal is not to charge individual developers. We make money by charging a license fee for enterprise features like Salesforce/Hubspot and SSO integrations.
Give it a try (https://github.com/enrolla/enrolla), and let us know what you think!
Main website: https://www.enrolla.io
52 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 126 ms ] threadAgreed that LaunchDarkly is incredibly over priced.
Growthbook (as mentioned in a sibling comment) is also open source (MIT License). Repo: https://github.com/growthbook/growthbook
Would be interested in knowing the feature differences between the three as they are all Node / Typescript projects
Does it make sense?
For context: we're in the process of evaluating/integrating Lago after several years of writing custom billing logic while figuring out "pricing-market" fit.
[0] http://getlago.com
Looks great! Starred the repo and look forward to seeing how this evolves :D
Is there any unique features Enrolla has that none of the competitors don't? If there isn't, you might want to come up with some, otherwise it'll be a hard sell to sell something newer, less polished and with no unique selling points.
But that's not a unique feature, it's a fairly basic feature for a "Feature toggle" service to have, you'd be looking for a while if you're trying to find one that doesn't have that.
Thanks for the comments; they are much appreciated and help us shape our messaging and understand what's not going through.
Edit: actually thinking about it, I think the "feature flags" wording is what kind of confused me, as it's usually used for developers, infrastructure and product teams to roll out changes, not for deciding what features should/should not be activated in the product because of the pricing/plans.
It's a pattern of ephemeral switches, that are meant to eventually be removed, while what you're doing are "permanent" flags, not meant to be temporary in order to roll out changes without breaking things.
I totally get you; we're struggling to find the correct wording. As an engineer, I also bump into the "gradual (temporal) rollout" as the first association of "Feature Flags".
What wording would make sense to you now that you understand the vision?
I gather you're probably not doing that stuff?
That said, I have LaunchDarkly for feature rollout, an ACL layer for clients to control their own team's permissions, and then custom code to enable features based on a client's package plan. It feels like a lot of conceptual overlap, and a unified solution would be nice.
We are running an open source React-based framework called "refine" for building any kind of CRUD app like admin panels, dashboards, forms and internal tool etc. If you want to take a look, here is the repo: Repo: https://github.com/refinedev/refine
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=necatiozmen
That makes the spam hilarious and sad! Hilarious because they didn't notice but sad because they didn't even check. The spam could have been a happy "Wow, so cool you're using what we're building" but instead it turned into a generic "Hey please use this thing I made" message.
I think this enables non-engineers to define pricing rules and the associated features.
I wonder if this could integrate well with getlago.com (we're looking at integrating that after years which feel partially wasted on implementing custom billing logic)
We recently open sourced Tier http://github.com/tierrun/tier which combines metering, entitlements, feature flags and a client side SDK to simplify things.
That said, LD is an expensive daily pain in my ass, and anything better, or even a little worse but cheaper, than it catches my attention.
What you suggested gets complex once you want to start making changes to your subscription plans. Let's say you want to experiment with different configurations. You'd then need to remember which customers were signed up with the "old" package configuration and each of the arms of your experiment, for example.
(Where I work we recently went from a home-rolled feature flag system similar to what you described to using LaunchDarkly)
You could always build it all your self, but I guess you could build a lot of things your self...
I absolutely understand that you could just read somejson from a cdn and call it a day, but at some point someone is going to have to maintain it and become the defacto feature flag person lol
django-waffle is an example of your approach, and worked pretty well in a monolithic environment. But it also exposed multiple issues in coordination in a service oriented environment, which is one reason why O'Reilly went to LaunchDarkly around 2018.
Growthbook has a Chrome dev plugin that allows you to simulate feature flags and value changes without having to modify the actual flags and watch the page update in response to the flag changes, which made it not only cheaper than LaunchDarkly, but markedly better to work with.
This one may help you: https://docs.enrolla.io/contributing/overview
If it doesn't, feel free to reach out at the community slack: https://join.slack.com/t/enrollacommunity/shared_invite/zt-1...
We can even jump on a call to assist you.
We launched https://devcycle.com about a year ago. We're not trying to compete in the self-hosted / on-prem space. Moreso a super simple setup and high flexibility.
Your use case is interesting though, it would definitely fix a lot of headache for people trying to do this via Auth0 directly. Also this just fits in a perfect slot for people starting up a new SaaS platform for sure. Super cool.