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Flag Owners: Who Is Responsible for Each Flag

Every flag should have someone who remembers why it exists and who takes it out when the job is done. A flag owner is that person, written down. Featureflip shows the owner on the flag, lets you filter the flags list by owner, and sends cleanup notices about a flag to its owner rather than to every admin in the organization.

Flag owners are on the Pro plan and above.

What an owner is

Section titled “What an owner is”

An owner is one active member of your organization, attached to one flag. A flag has at most one owner, or none, in which case it shows as Unowned.

Owning a flag grants no extra permissions. Anyone with the Member role or above can still edit it, toggle it or archive it, exactly as before. The owner is a pointer to the person accountable for the flag, and that’s all.

When someone creates a flag, they become its owner unless they pick somebody else. A flag created with a service token starts unowned, since a token is not a person.

Setting or changing an owner in the dashboard

Section titled “Setting or changing an owner in the dashboard”

When you create a flag. The Create Flag page has an Owner field. It defaults to Me (default), and the list holds every member of the organization. The hint under it reads “Who is accountable for this flag and for removing it when it is done.”

On an existing flag. The flag header shows Owner: followed by a name, or Unowned. Click Set owner or Change owner, choose a member from Choose a member, and click Save. To take the owner off without naming a new one, open the same control and click Clear owner.

You can’t change the owner of an archived flag. Restore it first.

Finding flags by owner. The flags list has an Owner column and an owner filter with Any owner, Mine, Unowned, and each member by name. Unowned is the quickest way to find flags nobody has claimed yet.

Owners, Admins and Members can set and clear owners. Viewers can’t.

Setting an owner through the API

Section titled “Setting an owner through the API”

The Management API takes the owner’s email address. It must belong to an active member of the organization.

Name an owner when you create the flag with ownerEmail:

POST /api/v1/orgs/{org}/projects/{project}/flags
{
  "key": "checkout-redesign",
  "name": "Checkout Redesign",
  "type": "Boolean",
  "ownerEmail": "sam@example.com"
}

Leave ownerEmail out and the owner is whoever the token belongs to. A service token creates the flag unowned.

Set or change the owner of an existing flag:

PUT /api/v1/orgs/{org}/projects/{project}/flags/{flag}/owner
{
  "email": "sam@example.com"
}

Clear it:

DELETE /api/v1/orgs/{org}/projects/{project}/flags/{flag}/owner

Both return 204 No Content. An email that doesn’t match an active member of the organization is refused with OWNER_NOT_MEMBER, and an empty email is treated the same way, so use DELETE to clear.

Flag responses carry the owner as an owner object with id, email and name, or null when nobody owns the flag. To list flags by owner, pass ?owner= with an email address, or ?owner=none for unowned flags:

GET /api/v1/orgs/{org}/projects/{project}/flags?owner=none

The API Reference has the full request and response shapes.

The MCP server returns the owner field in get_flag and list_flags output, so an agent can tell you who owns a flag. list_flags and find_stale_flags also take an owner filter: an email, me, or none for the flags nobody owns. set_flag_owner assigns an owner by email, or me for whoever the token belongs to, and create_flag accepts ownerEmail. The plan rules below apply the same way they do in the API.

When someone leaves the organization

Section titled “When someone leaves the organization”

Removing a member from Organization Settings opens the Remove Team Member dialog. On Pro and above, if the person owns any flags, it says how many: “Owns 4 flags. They will become unowned unless you reassign them.”

Pick a teammate under Reassign their flags to and every flag that person owned, archived ones included, moves to the teammate in the same step as the removal. Leave it on Leave unowned and the flags become unowned. Their cleanup notices then go to your Owners and Admins until someone claims them, and the Unowned filter shows exactly which flags those are.

Only Owners and Admins can remove members, so only they make this choice. Each ownership change is recorded in the audit log.

A person who deletes their own account keeps their flags until the deletion completes, at the end of its grace period. From then on those flags are unowned. While the deletion is pending, cleanup notices for their flags go to your Owners and Admins instead of to them.

Plan requirements

Section titled “Plan requirements”

Owners can be set and changed on Pro, Business and Enterprise. On Free and Team, the owner controls are hidden in the dashboard, and the API refuses a new owner with PLAN_FEATURE_UNAVAILABLE. Clearing an owner works on every plan.

Free and Team still record an owner for you. Each new flag quietly stores its creator as owner, so when you upgrade to Pro, the flags your team already made arrive with owners, and nobody has to go back and fill them in. The API returns that stored owner on any plan. Removing a member on Free or Team leaves their flags unowned, because choosing who inherits them needs Pro.

On Team, cleanup notices go to your Owners and Admins for every flag, whatever owner is stored. From Pro upward they go to the owner. Free has no cleanup notices.

See Plans and Limits for what each plan includes.

Next steps

Section titled “Next steps”