Permanent gates do count towards billable events. An event is recorded when your application calls the Statsig SDK to check whether a user should be exposed to a feature gate or experiment, and this includes permanent gates. However, if a permanent gate is set to 'Launched' or 'Disabled', it will always return the default value and stop generating billable exposure events.
During the rollout or test period of a permanent gate, exposures will be collected and results will be measured. This is when the gate is billable. Once you Launch or Disable the gate, it is no longer billable. The differentiation with permanent gates is that it tells our system not to nudge you to clean it up, and that it will end up living in your codebase long term. More details can be found in the permanent and stale gates documentation.
If you want to launch a feature flag, but only set a subset group to true, you can achieve this with a Permanent, non-billable gate that targets a specific set of users. You can toggle off “Measure Metric Lifts”, but keep the gate enabled. You don’t need to click “Launch” using that other workflow.
Marking a gate as permanent effectively turns off billable events. This is a useful feature if you want to target a specific set of users without running up billable events.
Please note that we are continuously working on streamlining this process and improving the user experience. Your feedback is always appreciated.