Build or buy a feature flagging platform?
Tags: webdev, git, programming, testing
Published: 2020-05-20 13:18:47

---
title: Build or buy a feature flagging platform?
published: true
description: As a developer or product manager, your mission is to deliver quality software on time. You are looking to make your team fast, productive, and more coordinated.
cover_image: https://i.imgur.com/bt2KPAg.jpg
tags: webdev, git, programming, testing
---

**Disclaimer:** *The content below is based on [Feature Flags Hub](https://featureflags.io/) - The Hub for Feature Flag Driven Development. This hub helps developers learn more about feature flagging techniques. This article just helps to clarify why I build my Project [UpStamps](https://upstamps.com). The Hub also shows alternatives projects and tools. If you have any questions please comment in a respectful way.*

### Build vs Buy

As a developer or product manager, your mission is to deliver quality software on time. You are looking to make your team fast, productive, and more coordinated. Most importantly, you want your customers to love your product. Feature flagging can help you achieve all these goals.

Developer tools are the foundation for building successful products. Without team collaboration tools, issue tracking tools, IDEs, and version control systems, your team would find it challenging to release high-quality software. To facilitate and improve product development, managers must inevitably decide whether to build developer tools in-house, purchase a platform, or maintain.

Feature flagging is a technique that becomes difficult to manage on an enterprise scale. It’s easy to manage one feature flag by modifying a configuration file, but when you have multiple feature flags across different environments, it’s harder to keep everyone in sync in a compliant fashion. Facebook has a feature flagging system called Gatekeeper that took years to build, using limitless engineering resources. Wrapping one feature with an if/else is just the start, an enterprise-grade feature flagging systems requires:

- An intuitive dashboard that an entire organization can use
- Complex business rules for flags – “Can we roll this out to 10% of customers in England?”
- Multivariate values – “If an end-user is on a different device version, behave differently.”
- Performance & targeting analytics.
- Speed in microseconds
- Scale to handle millions/billions of flag evaluations
- 100% uptime and redundancy

Companies that have built internal feature flagging tools (e.g. Google, Facebook, and Amazon) dedicated large teams of engineers and DevOps experts to build the platform, and continue to use full-time engineers to maintain and scale their systems.

### [How UpStamps helps?](https://www.upstamps.com)

[UpStamps](https://www.upstamps.com) is a Feature Flag Management Platform to separate code from different environments and projects. 

UpStamps helps teams manage their projects using feature management with a **Central control** to progressively deliver features to users with confidence.

[Sign Up for Free](https://app.upstamps.com)

🛳 Ship when you're ready 
🚀 Accelerate feature release 
🙈 Hide unfinished features

![UpStamps Control Center](https://i.imgur.com/FQEqNbP.png)

Useful links about UpStamps:

- [About](https://www.upstamps.com)
- [Documentation](https://docs.upstamps.com)
- [Start Testing in Production](https://app.upstamps.com)