how to release feature to 5 percent of users

To release a feature to 5% of users, you usually want gradual rollout / percentage-based feature flags.

Common ways

1) Feature flag / remote config

Use a flag system that supports targeting by percentage:

• LaunchDarkly
• Firebase Remote Config
• Unleash
• ConfigCat
• Optimizely

Set the feature to be enabled for 5% of the user population.

2) Deterministic user bucketing

Assign each user to a stable bucket based on something like:

• user ID
• account ID
• hash of ID

Example logic:

• Hash user ID
• Map to 0–99
• Enable feature if bucket < 5

This ensures:

• same users always get the feature
• rollout is consistent across sessions/devices

3) Infrastructure-level rollout

If you’re releasing through deployment tools:

• canary release
• blue/green deployment
• traffic splitting

This is more about routing 5% of traffic to a new version, which is slightly different from 5% of users.

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Best practice

If you mean 5% of users, use a feature flag with stable hashing.
If you mean 5% of requests/traffic, use a canary deployment.

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Example approach

Pseudo-logic:

import hashlib

def enabled_for_user(user_id):
    bucket = int(hashlib.sha256(str(user_id).encode()).hexdigest(), 16) % 100
    return bucket < 5

This gives ~5% rollout.

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Tips

• Monitor errors, latency, conversion
• Roll out gradually: 1% → 5% → 25% → 50% → 100%
• Make sure you can quickly turn it off
• Keep rollout deterministic per user

If you want, I can show you how to do this in JavaScript, Python, Java, or using LaunchDarkly/Firebase.