Build vs. Buy Feature Flags: Costs, Trade-offs, and When to Build Your Own
· 18 min read
Most homegrown feature flag systems start small: a boolean in a config file or a database table.
For a few temporary flags in one application, that may be enough. The complexity begins when other services need the same flag, product wants a gradual rollout, support needs customer-level access, or security asks who changed what.
At that point, you are no longer managing a boolean. You are operating shared release infrastructure. The build-versus-buy decision depends on how far you expect that infrastructure to grow and who will own it once the original project is finished.
