LaunchDarkly recently commissioned a Total Economic Impact™ study from Forrester Consulting. The study found a 379% return on investment for teams using LaunchDarkly, driven by top-line growth, cost reduction, and risk mitigation.
Software teams are shipping more code than ever. Users expect constant improvement, no downtime, and fast performance. This puts developers under pressure to deliver quickly and consistently. As Forrester points out in the study, “the increasing pressure on developers to deliver innovation quickly and effectively has highlighted the limitations of traditional software testing and release methods.”
That pressure grows as AI-generated code becomes part of everyday development. More code is written, tested, and deployed faster. But when that code reaches production, many teams can lose control of how it performs. They can deploy quickly, but they can’t easily isolate a feature, limit exposure, or act instantly when something goes wrong. CI/CD gets code to production, but it doesn’t give teams control after when the code goes live.
What LaunchDarkly provides for release control
LaunchDarkly is built to address this control gap. As the Forrester study notes, “LaunchDarkly is a runtime control plane for software features designed for engineers, developers, and others in the software development process.”
By separating deployments from releases, teams can decide when a feature is visible, who sees it, and how broadly it rolls out. They can progressively release code to small user segments, monitor performance, and turn functionality off instantly if needed. This allows teams to move quickly without relying on full rollbacks or emergency redeployments.
One interviewee, a LaunchDarkly customer who is the Head of Digital Engineering at a $39B retail company, summarized the impact clearly: “The main benefit is that it’s helped us to achieve continuous delivery, which is a given for any organization….”
About the Forrester TEI study
We commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ study. Forrester interviewed six decision-makers who use LaunchDarkly and created a composite organization based on their input.
This composite organization is a global enterprise with 34,000 employees and 300 developers using LaunchDarkly in their regular development workflows. Forrester modeled costs, benefits, and risks over three years.
Quantified improvements
Forrester identified several measurable benefits for the composite organization over three years:
- A 20% increase in developer testing and deployment efficiency. Engineers saved time on testing and release tasks, freeing time for higher-value work.
- A reduction in the chance of a deployment issue at the composite organization from 50% to 3%. The cost to remediate an issue also decreases by 80% (from $50,000 to $10,000).
- A 15% improvement in employee effectiveness. More reliable deployments and faster access to features improved employee productivity at user organizations.
- A net revenue gain of 0.10%. Safer, faster releases contributed to measurable margin gains.
Leaders described practical operational shifts behind these numbers. One said, “after implementing LaunchDarkly, our failure rate dropped [from 50%] to 2% to 3%.” Another noted that “the speed is faster, it’s immediate. It’s easier to debug. It’s easier to test.”
From large releases to controlled rollouts
Interviewees said that before using LaunchDarkly, they were managing infrequent, coordinated release events that were slow and error-prone. Code and features were tightly coupled. If something broke, the safest option was often to roll back the entire deployment.
After adopting LaunchDarkly, organizations moved to smaller, more frequent releases. Features could be isolated, rolled out gradually, and disabled instantly if needed. This reduced errors, improved productivity, and gave teams more confidence in production.
As software becomes more complex and AI-driven, the ability to act quickly in production becomes essential, and feature-level control helps contain risk.
Review the full financial model and findings
The Forrester Total Economic Impact™ of LaunchDarkly study details the methodology, assumptions, and financial model behind these findings. It also provides a clear framework for assessing the potential financial impact of adopting LaunchDarkly.
Download the study to learn more.
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