How LaunchDarkly’s Pricing Model Is Changing SaaS Monetization

Hey everybody, welcome back to another pricing teardown. Today we're going to dive into LaunchDarkly's pricing page, a company that's become a ubiquitous player in the feature management space. They created the category. LaunchDarkly helps teams ship faster by decoupling deploy from release. But how do they price? How do they price that value? In this episode, we're going to look at how their tiered pricing model works for, from free users to large enterprises. And we're going to look at what their pricing page tells us about who they're really trying to reach and attract. With me as always, co-founders of Schematic, Ben and Gio. Excited to dive in. So Ben, let's, let's start with you while Gio pulls this up. Give us a little bit of an overview on LaunchDarkly. You've used this tool at multiple companies, so tell us a little bit about how you think about their value as a product.

Sure, yeah, definitely. I have used LaunchDarkly quite a bit. I perceive them to be kind of like the 9,000-pound gorilla of feature management. It's kind of like the one you buy if you don't know which one to buy, you know, it's like the default choice. So they definitely have a really good brand and market saturation and reputation. One thing that I think about with value with feature management is it's a very mission-critical tool. Like it's in your lots of your code paths. There are mitigations for this, but like, it's definitely one of those tools where like your app could kind of go down if it goes down, at least like degrade significantly. So LaunchDarkly kind of brings a lot to the table in terms of just being like a highly reputable name, having super like robust dev tools and like lots of options for kind of like whatever architecture you have, being able to kind of like cater to whatever needs you have in that architecture, be they kind of like just something simple or something where you're willing to do a bit more legwork to get a higher level of kind kind of availability or like safety. So they're very flexible. They're very kind of like reputed. As far as like value prop, I do think it's mostly used in my experience, or I should say in the companies I've used it at, it's mostly been used for kind of like gating a feature that was under development until it was completely finished. So that way the company could do continuous deployment. And have small PRs without kind of prematurely releasing functionality to customers. There is like a large amount of surface area with LaunchDarkly that's more like experimentation. I have less experience with that, and I think a lot of companies have less experience with that. Those are kind of the two main use cases though, is like rollout of some kind, essentially separating your deployment process from your marketing or feature release process, which is like a super critical thing that all companies should do. And then there's the experimentation user stories, which to me are like a little bit more of an acquired taste. You know, you kind of have to have a lot of users to do experimentation. So that means probably you're consumer or you're just like one of the bigger B2B apps. So that's why it's kind of like a of a common thing.

Makes sense. And we're going to get into the anatomy of the pricing page here and how they've kind of woven in value prop, how they've thought about tiering, kind of the price metric, the FAQ, all of it. But before we do, one thing that I think is notable just right away is like there has been a major change from LaunchDarkly in like the last roughly year, year and a half, moving away from pricing that was predicated on the number of developers using the tool. In other words, seat-based pricing. So Ben, I imagine in many prior companies where you have used LaunchDarkly, you were paying for developer seats. Is that correct?

Yeah, I mean, I think people do kind of find the historical seat-based pricing to be like a complicating thing for using LaunchDarkly. And I've had the experience definitely of LaunchDarkly adoption within an organization being constrained by that. And if they're moving away from that, that does make sense to me. It also aligns with kind of just like a general trend in the SaaS industry, I think.

Yeah, I mean, it seems here, right? Like it's, it's $12 per service connection or, you know, 1,000 client-side monthly active users. Like they have moved away from seats. So it seems like they responded very much to that feedback from the market over the last couple of years.

I think it's kind of like the HBO problem or Netflix problem too. Like it's really hard to just, you you know, it's hard to be— basically, you're making a bad customer experience to some extent, and it's hard to kind of like enforce that people aren't just sharing usernames, you know, which a lot of smaller companies would do that. Also, it's like more coupled probably with their costs. Like, I mean, this is like a classic SaaS thing, but like a seat doesn't generally like cost you anything marginally. These service connections, or, you know, the amount of users, the amount of checks of flags, things like this, like that's much more correlated with like LaunchDarkly's kind of infrastructure costs, I would guess.

Yeah, makes sense. Well, you know, what's evident just in a cursory look at this, this table with their tiers is that they're serving individual developers. Maybe they're kind of like hobbyist developers or really small companies. They're serving growing companies and experimentation is sort of highlighted value proposition. And then interestingly, and I don't see this too often, they have what are in effect two enterprise tiers, Enterprise and Guardian. Ben, tell us what you see in the context of these two tiers. What is the main difference in value between Enterprise and Guardian?

So I'm not too familiar necessarily with what some of these features are, but I think it looks like it's kind of like an enterprise tier that has more deep integration with your actual deployments. Like, and this is something I've, I've kind of hand-rolled at some previous companies where like you have your launch darkly or, or what have you. And then you have like, in my case, like an ECS AWS type deployment, maybe where you're doing like a rolling or blue-green style deployment and you want to have a phase there where you're like monitoring for metrics. And then potentially rolling back, you know, if certain metrics start to look bad. And it makes sense for LaunchDarkly to move into this more, but it's kind of an interesting move for them to make just because like what makes that hard, at least the companies I've been at, is like that tends to be something where you need to coordinate like maybe your Datadog or whatever other observability tool with your feature management, with potentially your infrastructural deploy. Like probably this is based around a way where your deployments are completely flag-based. So you're really just integrating like production metric and health data with LaunchDarkly. But yeah, it's a clear kind of integration point. So it makes sense for them to expand into it.

Yeah. Gio, talk a little bit about what you see here from kind of the anatomy of how they're pricing their product perspective.

Yeah, I mean, one, one thing you brought up right away is they moved from seat-based and that was a big deal for them, especially in a space that has been seat-based up until now. And since they are like the tastemaker, that means a lot. They certainly got a lot of feedback on that. And I'd be curious how they manage that transition. It's one thing to change your pricing page. It's another thing to start offering new plans. And then it's a whole other thing to migrate existing customers to your new set of plans and support old plans that are ostensibly seat-based. So that sounds hard to do. I'm curious how they made that happen.

Well, we do have a little bit of insider baseball there because Joe Ryan has been on this podcast and he, I think, was very much involved with this transition for them. And I think it was, you know, it was, it's a huge deal to shift your price metric, especially at a company at scale as LaunchDarkly was at that time 2 years ago. And I think it was kind of full of change management and cross-functional alignment and customer communication. I mean, it was a real initiative for the business.

Yeah, I think they are switching to two new metrics in terms of at least their two self-service plans. So Service Connections and client-side monthly active users. So I think one thing they're trading off here is like, that's a little bit more complicated to instantly understand, but it might be worth it for them, right? That's like Ben was saying, that's closer to what, where actual costs are. It's usage-based. It doesn't stop people from inviting teammates to the product, which I think is like an unhelpful part about seat-based. So that's an interesting trade-off. And then they clearly have two self-service plans and two that are not at all self-service plans where they're maybe not even using any usage-based limits. Or if they are, they're not really shown here. Whereas you see the usage metrics around Service Connections, client-side MAU, experimentation MAU, a little bit on projects and environments. But that's kind of it. Beyond that, it's like all on-off features, um, a lot of on-off features, but the usage-based stuff ends there, which I think— oh, you've got some account history stuff, but they've really switched to these 3 metrics, and one of them also implies their new push into experimentation.

Yeah, I think these price metrics are pretty interesting too, just from a persona perspective, like this is dev tool pricing, you know, like if you were, if you were to look at like a business stakeholder or product manager or something like, they're not going to probably be in a good position at back of the napkin in any way, like what that $12 per month per 1K adds up to in most cases. So this is like, this looks a lot more like your Vercel pricing model, your Datadog pricing model, your AWS pricing model where like, you need kind of intimate knowledge of like your infrastructure that's going to be connecting to this in order to even model it at all. So it's, that's kind of the trade-off you often get with these types of pricing schemes is like you're trading simplicity for accuracy to the cost and potentially like value being delivered.

Right. Just to add on to that, it's like when it was seat-based, you could just ask yourself how many people need to use this and know how much you're going to pay. Now you might not know unless you— yeah, like I'm not sure how you would determine service connections. Not all personas could. And a lot of people might not even be able to immediately know client-side monthly active users. So that is one downside is like, you're not, you can't look at this and kind of know what you're likely to pay.

You know, it's notable to me from a metrics perspective, price metric perspective is And I wonder if you guys agree or disagree with this, but it seems like at least in the last 5 years, let's take a step back. LaunchDarkly has created the feature management category. They have scaled into the biggest feature management company in the world, arguably. In the last few years, maybe the majority of their competition has come from startups like Statsig and potentially PostHog. First of all, let me stop there. Does that feel true to you guys?

I think so.

And so kind of where I'm going with this is like when I look at like a Statsig, I see Statsig basically pricing around this idea that feature flagging should be free. In other words, they'll state things like unlimited feature flags and then they're really trying to charge around like the number of events. That, you know, kind of in the context of like A/B testing. Again, they highlight unlimited flag and config checks. They don't really talk about monthly active users. And LaunchDarkly is not talking about limited or unlimited flag check feature flags or flag checks. It seems like the two companies are actually kind of thinking about the price metrics quite differently. And I wonder how you guys would respond to that observation.

Well, it does seem like they're both kind of pushing, as Gio pointed out, in this experimentation direction, which like, again, like this, it's just my opinion. I feel that that's like not the most high impact aspect of feature management, but that doesn't mean that a lot of people don't try to do it. Right. And it is definitely an area where these larger FM players are pushing. To monetize more. So it's similar in that way, I think.

Yeah. Maybe what the difference is, like, it seems to me like Statsig is trying to kind of counterposition on price and say, hey, feature flags are free. There's no limit on flag evaluations, but nowhere do I see LaunchDarkly pricing around the number of feature flags or the number of evaluations.

Well, what Statsig is doing is pricing on event ingestion, I think.

Yes, that's right. Like, that's their metric. But you see what I'm saying? Like, this idea that, like, the feature flag is this commodity that should be given away for free as sort of a counter-positioning maneuver from Statsig, right? I get it in theory, but I don't see LaunchDarkly kind of actually pricing against that type of metric at all. And so I'm wondering if I'm missing anything.

I think, I do think we're looking at a pricing model from LaunchDarkly that is an iteration from some of the price pressure they've gotten from other players. Like, I think it's been like a few years now that the cost of LaunchDarkly has been a topic of conversation, right? And like being the market leader, they've been able to charge a good price for what they do, you know, but there's certainly like very strong competitors on the market now who are price competitive. And I think some of the changes we've been talking about have been in some way a way for LaunchDarkly to become more resilient to that complaint that people have.

I think I'd say, Fynn, though, is that they are saying unlimited flags and flag checks, actually. Well, they're just saying up to 1,000 users.

Yeah, it's active users. And yeah, it probably makes sense because like, yeah, I think what really does cost them is the service connections and like the MAUs. That's like a, flag-evaluated service connection, right? So I don't think like the same user making a few flag checks in a session really costs them anything different than making one flag check in a session. So it does make sense. It's just like I said, it's hard to calculate really in most cases from the buyer's perspective. Not in most cases, like you could just like do your MAU numbers, but with this type of metric too, it's like always very important how they measure it, right? Like, I think at a previous company, we got ourselves into trouble at one point by just like how we were identifying our customers to launch Darkly. And we ended up kind of like seeming like we had way more MAUs than we did and paying the price for that. So, you know, a lot of this, it's like, again, like a seat is a very straightforward metric. An MAU is something that they're going to define it how they're going to define it.

A little bit more complicated, but hopefully more value.

But another thing I would maybe add to on this point you're making, Fynn, is that LaunchDarkly has kind of been like a victim of their own success in a certain way too, not just because they've been so successful that they've charged a price premium that then became like a target for them, but also because like you said, they kind of established this feature flags as a service category. And so a lot of their core functionality has just become like the standard, right? And so a company like Statsig is coming in and just putting kind of like a little bit of a twist on it with the experimentation. Like there's not necessarily a reason why in your core conception of feature management, like as LaunchDarkly kind of defined it for everyone, that event tracking needs to be a part of that, right? Like it becomes a part of it because they're doing this twist on it where it's very much experimentation focused, right? So That seems to be the maneuver a lot of these smaller players are doing is there's some type of twist where it's feature management that is doing more than just the kind of toggling if statements as a service thing.

Makes sense. So I want to move in a second into the anatomy of the pricing page, like how they've thought about FAQ and feature comparison tables and all that. But before we do that, I have one more question for Ben and it's Ben, if you scroll back up to the top, Ben, they're obviously trying to appeal to early-stage companies all the way through enterprise, inclusive of enterprise with potentially like very real security and compliance concerns around feature deployment rollout. With your startup CTO hat on, which of these tiers do you gravitate toward?

I mean, I would obviously stay on the free tier as long as I can. I think This isn't the— this is definitely a— I don't want to say on the generous side necessarily, because that's all relative to what the competition is. But I mean, this is a free tier that doesn't necessarily force people off of it that quickly. I don't think like you're getting forced off of it because you need experimentation, which again, I'm not a huge believer on it at scale, right? Or you need like kind of team access features around like kind of, um, you just have concerns about provisioning and deprovisioning, like things that happen at a certain level of maturity. So that's like where the SSO, you pay for that, or just like you need more projects, you need more service connections than they show there. Yeah, probably, probably the 5 service connections per month would be what would fire us from this. Yep.

And then that would move us into Foundation, or do you think you'd end up going Yeah, like would you go foundation monthly or foundation yearly?

I mean, with my startup CTO hat, I don't usually like paying annual for anything. I mean, I'll do reserved instances for like AWS, but not paid upfront or anything. I mean, if you're early stage, like you might, you know, who knows what might be happening in a year. You don't want a year contract for anything, but I mean, it is an invasive product that you're probably going to make a big decision about what you adopt and then a big decision about ripping it out. So if you do buy it, compared to most vendors, you're less likely to change to a different feature management vendor within a year, I would say. Yeah.

Gio, want to ask the same question with your product hat on because you've also used LaunchDarkly before from the standpoint of product. And so kind of walk us through which tier is most attractive to you with your early stage product leader hat on?

Yeah, I think the same as Ben. I'm staying on free as long as possible. I think that if you are a B2B, like vertical B2B startup, you probably can be on free for a while. But if you're a product with like a, with its own free tier and a lot of usage that comes from that. Like, you can quickly get above 1,000 in monthly active users, and then you're paying $12 per service connection or per 1,000 monthly active users, which again, even just saying that, like, the math seems like it could get complicated just to tally that up. Um, but Yeah, I think if I'm more of a B2C type startup or product, that kind of worries me that maybe I'll do a big launch and get like a lot of monthly actives that are not even paying me. And then I actually have to pay LaunchDarkly to like kind of what Ben said, like they kind of shifted to dev tool infra. Type pricing. And a lot of those, as we reviewed, a lot of those tools also have really mature transparency controls and spend limits and stuff. And you kind of need that at a certain point, although maybe I'm making a meal of it because, you know, maybe people kind of know what their monthly actives are and they kind of know what their service connections are and kind of the, the risk is not actually that high.

But yeah, I think, I think the risk is not horrible. It's kind of, I feel like it's more like a Datadog where like month over month, you might be like, man, why is my bill higher again this month? But it's not like in one day you're going to, you know, let's like those Firebase horror stories you see of like, I got a $50 million bill or whatever. And I'm on hold with their support. But I do think like on the point of it being non-obvious, like, I mean, people know what their MAUs are for the most part, and they know how many services they're running, but it's just still not that obvious. Like, I mean, the MAUs, I think, is basically like client-side connections and the service connections is basically server-side connections. And in my mind, like the correct way to do feature management would be to have like a client-side implementation and a server-side implementation, kind of like permissions. Like you would check it on the server and the client, which means you're kind of paying for everyone twice with this model if you do it like in my mind correctly. So things like that could really trip you up if you're trying to model upfront, but I think once you're in, it's not going to be super unpredictable. It's just going to be going in a direction that, you know, you can probably predict.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, let's, let's move into the anatomy of the pricing page. So, Gio, what I'd like you to do is walk us through the key components from a design perspective on this page. I mean, clearly there are tiers, but what follows?

Yeah, like I say on all of these, the most important thing about a pricing page is that it seems approachable and simple and clear at first glance. And I think they do achieve that. We talked about like there's these two kind of usage metrics that are a little not the simplest ever, but besides that, like there's clarity here. I think they're pushing on the fact that it's unlimited seats. They really want you to know that. They're also pushing this new feature, Guardian, in their homepages too. And they're using the pricing page to do that, which is an interesting choice. Like, I don't know the significance of this new feature and what it means for the go-to-market and the roadmap, but they're just giving it as much prominence as you possibly could.

Do you view that as a feature or as like a It's a feature separated into its own tier. What's the right way to think about it?

I don't know a whole lot about this Guardian really— Guardian or Guarded Releases. I think it's a product that they just— that launched relatively recently, and you can see their whole marketing site is angled around it. And it's interesting because they're putting it in this like enterprise tier, so it says something about like, yes, we have a free tier. Yes, we have a self-service tier, but like, we really want our enterprise customers to be looking at this new product we launched.

Well, yeah, another way I think about it, it's like we have two enterprise tiers. There's like a gradation of enterprise on top of original enterprise. And it's the type of enterprise who has like way more concern around like compliance at rollout and risk and security at rollout.

Yeah. If I had to guess, it's like they have, they want the people on this tier to upgrade to this tier.

Yeah.

Although it is interesting. Like, yeah, just the layout is interesting because I don't think it necessarily has to be the case that this feature set is only built on enterprise. Like most likely, like people that are willing to spend on enterprise are more likely to be the type of customers that want like a lot of CYA on their deploy process. But with my CTO startup hat on, like, we would have functionality like that, that we would probably more so like hand roll well before we would be at a point of paying for like an enterprise LaunchDarkly seat. Like, we're already kind of doing stuff like this, like metric monitors on deployment. It just doesn't automate rollbacks. But like, we may be ahead of the game on this for our stage just because we're more of an infrastructural product. But You know, I can see wanting that at any stage depending on the type of product.

Is that the primary value is the automated rollback or is that just one portion of the value to you on this, on this broken out tier?

Yeah, like I said, I kind of need to read up on this more. What it looks like is an integration with PagerDuty and probably some other tools like that. And yeah, some way to basically like stage a deploy by flipping some flags. And then if that integration tells you that there are problems with the deploy, just undo that. I, yeah, there's like AI special sauce on this. I don't know really what that is. Insights from rollouts. Who knows?

I didn't know that they have session replay.

Everyone has session replay now.

Everyone seems to have that now, but it's, again, it seems to, appears to be part of this like monitoring tier.

I've heard like error monitoring and stuff like that. Becoming like a really interesting category because it's like, kind of like feature management too. I feel like it's something that like lots of different vendors can just offer. Cause it's like, in a way it's an extension of logging and it's extension of monitoring and it's extension of, you know, in this case kind of experimentation. So like similar to like auth or feature management, like there's a lot of like adjacencies you could kind of like merge together categories. Pretty interesting time for. Monitoring and error tracking.

Yeah, interestingly too, session replay is not on this feature breakdown.

I had noticed that too, yeah.

Something about this Guardian product maybe contains that too. And I agree with Ben, it's like, are they saying we think this Guardian product is for enterprise only? At least maybe they're starting that way. They're not saying anybody can have this as an add-on or—

It's not an add-on because it's everything in Enterprise Plus. I'm just saying like I could see some of those features being something that lower tiers purchase, right?

What I'm saying is like, if they wanted lower tiers to do it, maybe they could make it an add-on, but instead they've made it like their highest plan, which is interesting choice.

Okay, keep taking credit for doing that thing. And like, yeah, it just goes to show you can't please everyone with your pricing model and your, your, your packaging, of course.

Definitely.

All right, so then they give us a table with all the features per plan.

Yeah, and actually I want to make one quick note, which is I think they missed an opportunity here. In my opinion, what the strongest way to present monthly versus yearly is actually to toggle to yearly by default and show them monthly price billed yearly, which would then be, you know, smaller. Yeah, like $10 a month. So that, I would say, have the yearly toggle on and have this say $10 a month. And I think that's the strongest way to, to show the discount. Small kind of UX thing. Um, if you keep going, yeah, you have a pretty simple feature breakdown. You have a little bit more context for each feature on, on roll hover. We've seen other companies actually link to docs for each of these. I think that's Great. I can imagine how much work that is, but yes, that's a lot better. You've got all these different sections or different features by product. There isn't much in here again about their Guardian product, which perhaps that's just where they are in this process of rolling it out. Maybe it'll be in here more. And then you've got your classic FAQ, they do say something around like, well, they say, how do you calculate a month? That's just like a billing period, but they do address like, how do I figure out how many monthly active users do I have or do I need? How do you calculate it? How do I, how many do I need?

Yeah, I don't mean to imply with that, my commentary on that, that they're being intentionally obscure. It's just, that's a metric that you as a vendor have to define. And therefore, if you want to be transparent, like you need FAQs like this. I mean, a lot of times I think it's just a conversation that happens during the sales cycle more so than like a self-service thing, at least for a company like LaunchDarkly.

Right. They've got, um, they do mention this, like I would probably, another opportunity is to make this a more prominent option. Like if you have a nonprofit or some startup tier, you know, why not make that more prominent? Unless you really, again, like there's some signal here that they, they are providing a free tier and stuff, maybe to keep from getting outflanked by a PostHog and a StatSig and stuff. But they don't, you know, their bread and butter is over here. It feels like in a lot of ways. And by making the startup discount or whatever, a little bit hidden. That's sort of another hint in that direction. And then another one is here, like you see the first case study is a massive company, Paramount, and the others are also huge. And then you, they end up with a demo. And this actually, this is an interesting callout. This is the first time I've seen a free trial button. Maybe that's an artifact from a previous version because they have a free tier. So I assume this free trial just sends you to sign up. Let's check it out. They don't have a free trial.

Well, next week, next week we're going to go into the buying experience, but just click on that for one second just to— so we don't forget it.

Yeah, I went in. It's just going into— it's not showing.

Okay.

It just sends you here and it just has you sign up.

You schedule a demo.

Which is—

it's a reverse trial, right? 14 days of unlimited access.

There you go. 14 days of— I wonder if that's— I suppose that's everything, everything, like all the way to the Guardian plan or whatever. So there is a trial. Interesting. Let me try one thing. If I go back here and I just— it's interesting that you don't see that Well, you see, let's start. Okay. That's kind of what I thought. I thought it might be a trial of the Foundation plan. I assume that's— and if you go through this button, okay. So either way, they're going to put you on the reverse trial. And I assume it is the Foundation tier, but maybe it's more than that.

Okay. We're, we're coming against, up against time. So time to do what we always do. And that's score LaunchDarkly's pricing page on a scale of 1 to 5. If you throw a 5, it means that you think that they've delivered a really exceptional, meets all the right bars pricing page. And if you throw under a 5, talk about why you went under a 5 and what they could do to get you from whatever number you throw to a 5. Ben, we'll kick it off to you.

I'll go 3.

6.

I think there, there's some areas that could be better. To me, I think it's mostly good as a, like I said, as a potential buyer of this, I feel like I, I kind of like desire more of a mix and match experience, you know, like there's kind of a lot they have going on, but their pricing is like very simple. So it's kind of like you know, it's like targeting certain personas that maybe I fall in between the cracks of them. There's little things like the, like what Gio said about the proration or not proration, yearly discount. And then yeah, I think it is just like a little hard to win with these like not completely clear metric definitions or price metric definitions. And also we've looked at some other vendors that do have that. That do it better and make it more kind of obvious what it's going to be. Like an FAQ is great. They're transparent enough, but we definitely have seen companies that take that another step.

Cool. Chio, take us away. What do you give them?

I was going to say something similar between a 3 and a 4. The first thing is they're trying to talk to a lot of personas here, and that's just hard. But you do see some of the downsides of that where there's a free tier and a self-service tier, but there's two enterprise tiers. And the most prominent option is this like enterprise option. And that's a bit confusing in terms of where I'm supposed to pay attention. And if I'm like an early stage company, I have to kind of ignore a bunch of stuff that doesn't matter to me. The other comment is similar to Ben's, where it's like a strong— an addition you could make here is give people the ability to like toggle how many service connections they expect to have, how many monthly active users they have. Use sensible defaults on that toggle. Give people more transparency around what they could expect to pay. And now we're getting into deep strategy stuff, but like, if there are features that are in Enterprise and Guardian that even a smaller company could benefit from, and I'm thinking of session replay, although maybe the context of that feature is really specific, but why not unbundle that and allow me in a self-service tier to spend extra to get some of those features? I probably the answer, if given we've been in this space, probably the answer is like, that's not straightforward for them to implement internally. And that's why they've done it. They're maybe just rolling out this new feature and have done it as simply as possible. But yeah, that's why I wouldn't give it more than a 4. I think there's just some opportunities around what can I expect to pay, maybe allow me to get add-ons around features that are out of my tier. And, but who are you actually really, really focused on on this page is broad and that dilutes the experience a bit.

Yeah. So I'm, I'm personally pretty conflicted on this and I'll see if I can explain why concisely. Like for me as an individual having an enormous amount of respect for LaunchDarkly, even affection for the company because we know people there who are incredible operators. I kind of want to say I want to give a 5, but like I kind of feel like I want to give a 3 in terms of like how this pricing page kind of personally makes me feel. But I'd probably give them like a 4 or 5 or a 4.5 for this pricing page based on what I assume their business wants, you know, is trying to optimize for. So let me see if I can explain the two threads. Like I think they're trying to optimize for going upmarket and winning enterprise. And I think this pricing page probably does that quite adequately, if not more than adequately. You know, they've got kind of like the quintessentials, right? Like they've got clear tiering, they've got a clear feature table, they've got solid enough FAQ. They've got a little bit of social proof with a massive company, Paramount. Like, they have hit all the fundamentals. For me, Fynn Glover, a startup founder, it's more like a 3. It doesn't restate value prop. It doesn't bang me over the head with social proof. It doesn't excite me. The FAQ is rather vanilla. There's, there's not really a strong brand asset here. This is just a standard B2B SaaS pricing page is sort of the way it feels. And I kind of find myself wanting more from this pricing page from the category creator. So that's, that's sort of how I'm feeling about it. For me personally, maybe a 3 for what I think they're trying to do as a business, probably a 4.5 to a 5. I do think it's best practice to like always restate value prop. I understand why they're not doing that because they're so well known and so well understood. But the world's changing really fast. And so I think that there's always room to restate value prop.

Yeah. And my recap of it is like they are always focused upmarket to your point. And maybe this pricing page is nailing it for that persona, but they're clearly concerned about being outflanked downmarket. And that ends up with this, a little bit of a split personality type pricing page. And it makes me think about like, probably they really care about enterprise and they're just shoring up the downmarket stuff. They're not necessarily putting a lot of eggs into that basket. It's another reminder of how a pricing page, if you really look closely at it, is maybe the cleanest distillation of the company strategy in terms of what you can make of it from anything public-facing.

Yeah, 100% agree with that. Well, look guys, thank you so much. That wraps part 1 of our 2-part teardown of LaunchDarkly. We've done the pricing pitch today. Next week we're going to, um, go as deep as we can into the entire purchasing experience, from signing up to using the product to expanding. We obviously won't go through like an enterprise sales process, but we'll go as deep as we can sort of short of that. This was really fun. I think we kind of obviously see like, you know, a category creator here, tiered pricing, serving the enterprise, solid transparency, but maybe kind of the main takeaway is it's hard to speak to the entire market from hobbyist developer all the way to enterprise who cares a lot about security and compliance. An automated rollback and things of that nature. So thank you for paying attention to this. Thank you for tuning in and see you next week.