The Feature Flag Staleness Budget

How many stale flags is too many? The 30-day budget, the dashboard, and the policy that keeps feature flag debt bounded.

What "stale" means

Stale is binary. A flag at 100 percent on or 0 percent on for 30 or more days is no longer doing experimentation work; it is technical debt with config-management overhead. Permanent kill switches and regional toggles are explicitly excluded and tagged at creation so they are not misclassified.

• 100 or 0 percent for 30+ days. Binary-state-too-long rule. The flag has stopped serving its purpose.
• Permanent flags excluded. Kill switches and regional toggles tagged permanent at creation. Stay out of the stale list.
• Auto-detected. Stale flags move to the cleanup list automatically. Owners see them in their dashboard without manual tracking.
• Named owner per flag. Responsible engineer recorded at creation. Catches "everyone-and-no-one" flag ownership.

The budget

20 stale flags total across the org. Above that, new flag creation is blocked until the count drops back below the cap. The budget hit forces a cleanup sprint rather than letting flag debt accumulate quietly into a maintenance nightmare.

• 20 stale flags total cap. Org-wide ceiling. New flag creation blocks above the cap.
• Why 20. Empirical bar from observation. Below 20 the team cleans up reactively; above, cleanup never happens because nobody wants to start.
• Budget hits trigger cleanup sprint. Forced cadence on every breach. Drives explicit, dedicated cleanup time.
• Published threshold. Visible cap across the org. Supports honest progress conversations rather than vague "we should clean up flags."

Dashboard

The dashboard surfaces flag debt before anyone has to ask about it. One screen, three views, linked directly from the flag-platform UI so engineers see the debt context every time they create a flag.

• Total, stale, top owners. Three views on one screen. One-glance summary.
• Quarterly trend. Growing-or-shrinking signal across quarters. Growth signals process erosion.
• Linked from the flag platform. Visible debt context at flag-creation time. Engineers see the count before adding to it.
• Named cleanup sprint per quarter. Dedicated cleanup time on the calendar. Catches the "we will get to it" trap.