We just released Flipper 1.0. But this release is more than just a version number. For years now, we've used Flipper and Cloud extensively–and many customers have as well–but it's always been a side project.
Not anymore!
We want Flipper to be everyone's favorite way to release software confidently, but it's not going to get there as a side project. It has to be real – full time.
One New Teammate
To that end, we've added our first full time person – Garrett Dimon. Garrett is an awesome designer and developer who we've known forever. We've wanted to work with him on a regular basis for (well over) a decade, and it's finally time.
One of my favorite projects by Garrett is minitest-heat – a test result reporter (we use it on Cloud). Garrett has been slinging some extremely clean code for us the past few months, including the majority of the work I'm announcing at the bottom of this post.
Does this mean that Flipper Cloud is now self-sustaining? Nope. We believe in Flipper so we're self-funding it. We've always been bootstrappers. That's who we are. But thanks to a little known startup, we can bootstrap with a little gas on the fire this time around.
One New Org
Along with 1.0, we've changed the location of the repo. Flipper has always lived amongst my @jnunemaker repos (so I can get that GitHub ⭐️ cred). But a few weeks ago we moved it to the new @flippercloud org. Now all Flipper related repos can live together under that org's umbrella making it easier to find everything and get started.
With the new org, we've also set up GitHub Sponsors. Since many companies rely on Flipper, but can't use Cloud for compliance and other reasons (yet... 😉), sponsorships provide an opportunity to help sustain Flipper outside of Cloud along with other benefits.
If your company uses Flipper and wants to help us make it better, consider becoming a sponsor.
One more thing...
1.0. Our first hire. A new GitHub org. Sponsorships. This post is hitting hard, am I right? Today is a great day. I'm feeling good.
How about the next round (of flipping features) is on me?
We want everyone (that can) to use Flipper Cloud. So today we're releasing an entirely free (as in 🍺) tier.
- Sign up with GitHub (or an email).
- Import your feature data from Flipper open source (aka Cloudless).
- Enjoy free feature flipping.
What's Free?
As I alluded to earlier, Flipper was born while we worked for a company with a pretty great freemium model. And, technically, we already have and support a free version through the open source gem. So why not add a free tier in Cloud as a means to get you hooked? 😊
As of today, for free, you can now...
- Use Cloud as your source of truth for your develoment and deployed environments, and sync it (without affecting performance) wherever you need (to a single server or across datacenters).
- Create as many environments as you like. The bonus is they all inherit from production, so each new developer or any other environment (staging, QA, etc.) you may have will work like prod out of the box.
- Invite all your co-workers (and friends). Go wild. Add as many projects (one for each micro-service) and developers (or PMs, marketers, designers, etc.). When we say invite everyone, we're talking Oprah style: "you get a seat, you get a seat, you get a seat").
- Flip as many features as you'd like. We've decided not to limit the number of features or any of that. Use Flipper as you would normally, we'll just also keep track of it in Cloud. You can even add descriptions for your features. (Trust me it's all easier in Cloud.)
That's a pretty solid free tier, right? We hope we can keep it this way forever, and we'll keep adding value to the paid tiers that make it increasingly attractive to upgrade.
What's Not Free?
As much as we'd like to, we can't give it all away for free. So let's talk about the additional stuff you can get on a paid plan. The gist of it is that if you want to know who did what, control who can do what, or have tools for organizing your features, you'll want the paid tier.
- Permissions. The free tier gives everyone in an org the same permissions. If you need finer-grained permissions, you'll need to upgrade.
- Audit logs. Who did what and when. Every feature. Every change.
- Rollbacks. Paid accounts can rollback to any point in time. Click a button, receive a rollback. This has already saved my butt a few times.
- Organization. Tags and other tools for organizing all your features will remain paid. We have some cool plans here that should be coming soon as well. Helping you keep feature flags tidy and making it easier to manage them long-term are key areas we're excited about.
We feel like this free plan gives you a chance to try us risk free and see how safe and awesome flipping features can be. Then, as new features are enabled, you'll already be migrated and only a click away.
Wrap Up
That was a lot. So let's recap:
- Flipper is now 1.0 and located at flippercloud/flipper on GitHub.
- We're committing our own money to make Flipper sustainable (and would love your sponsorship as well). The first fruits of this commitment are Garrett and the new free tier.
- You can now get started with Flipper Cloud for free. Go ahead, sign up and give it a try! And let us know if you have any questions.
P.S. We actually enabled free plans last Friday. And henceforth we shall release all new features on Fridays, as a way of truly embodying this blog's title – The Friday Deploy.
Deploy safely my friends!