Our great sponsors
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lago
Open Source Metering and Usage Based Billing API ⭐️ Consumption tracking, Subscription management, Pricing iterations, Payment orchestration & Revenue analytics
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WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
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Plausible Analytics
Simple, open source, lightweight (< 1 KB) and privacy-friendly web analytics alternative to Google Analytics.
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InfluxDB
Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
Hi HN, we’re the cofounders of Lago: an open-source alternative to Stripe Billing, Chargebee, and Recurly. That is, we make software that helps businesses calculate how much their own customers should pay them—based on their subscription, consumption, discounts, taxes, credit notes, or negotiated terms—and then invoice them.
Our website is at https://www.getlago.com and our Github is here: https://github.com/getlago/lago.
We’re focused on composability (use only the parts you need), metering (measuring how much of a software service end users use, so that the service can charge them based on that), code transparency (we’re open source, so no black box - you can have a full understanding of how we built our API) auditable code, no lock-in into anyone’s ecosystem, and fair pricing (we don’t take a cut of your revenue).
We’ve been in Fintech for more than 7 years, and were the earliest employees at Qonto.com (SMB Neobank in EU), where we built and scaled the billing system and led the revenue team that took the company from pre-launch to $100M+ of ARR.
Back in the early days at Qonto, our pricing was very simple, a single “all-included” subscription. We budgeted 3 months of a single back-end to “get it done, once and for all”. As we shipped new features (add-ons, new tiers, usage-based etc), improved the packaging, changed our reporting structure as we matured (or instance, we changed the billing cycles from anniversary dates to calendar dates which looked trivial until we had to migrate 100K+ companies), launched new countries (new prices, new taxes implications new reporting!), we iterated on pricing dozens of times.
We consistently underestimated the engineering nightmare billing would create, and learned the hard way about side effects: delayed launches at best, billing errors at worst, resulting in churning users. We wrote an article about this that had a large HN thread last year (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31424450).
We tried to get rid of our home-grown system many times but never found an alternative that was flexible enough. As a result, there were only two options: either stop iterating on pricing and leave revenue on the table, or grow a billing engineering team. We chose the second, but it was expensive. Finding pricing or monetization experts living in spreadsheets is easy, but finding technical professionals to build and maintain a billing system is a real bottleneck. Few engineers or product managers have experience in billing, and it’s rarely a career path they look forward to.
At some point, we realized we’d stopped being able to do pricing strategy based on what was best for the company and found ourselves driven by what was easiest to implement—not because we wanted to, but because it was all too complicated. We asked around and realized a lot of companies were in a similar situation. There are a lot of clunky internal billing systems out there! We spent a lot of time analyzing why no one had solved this problem, as we thought companies like Stripe or Chargebee had partially addressed it. We came to the conclusion that a proper solution needed to be open source.
A lot of teams continue to build their billing system themselves because they have unique edge cases that closed-source solutions can’t address. They are part of the “long tail”, which a closed-source SaaS has no incentive to invest in solving. That’s how we arrived at the idea of open sourcing “core billing” foundations that other people could use and build on. We don’t solve 100% of use cases either, but what we don’t solve, others can build, without having to reinvent an entire system. We think of Lago’s features like “Legos” you can pick to build your own system, rather than a “one size fits all” billing platform.
Unlike closed source solutions, we aim at giving full transparency on how Lago works (auditable code), and enable our users to pick only the parts of our product that are relevant to their needs (e.g., if they are already handling subscription management but want to manage prepaid credits with Lago, they can). You can make your own design decisions, build anything custom that you need, and collaborate with other engineers in the community.
For instance, one of our users built a Javascript SDK that is now available to everyone. Others are developing additional “charge models”: for instance we don’t offer the ability to “cap a charge” yet: if you’re a fintech processing transactions, you’d like to bill for instance “2% of the transaction amount capped at $50”, to make your pricing attractive. We’re working with a team who are contributing this to Lago. Other contributions involve adding native integrations with local payment processors (in India, Northern Europe, Africa, Middle East), because they usually cater better to the needs of local players in these regions: better payment success rates, better conversions at checkout pages, and usually better prices.
We’re making Lago as open as possible to adjacent tools (e.g., payment processors, quoting software, CRMs, etc.)—both market leaders and niche solutions in smaller markets. We’ve built native integrations with GoCardless and Stripe Payments, but our API is usable with any payment processor from any region, and some community members are already doing so.
We’re also partnering with Osohq.com, open-source as well, that manages authorization and entitlements (granting access to a specific feature if a user had subscribed to a specific plan): https://doc.getlago.com/docs/integrations/entitlements/oso
Exciting to see the progress of Lago and the attention being given to the challenges in the SaaS billing world.
We're also working in the billing space with a complementary tool, Tier (https://github.com/tierrun/tier). Although we currently do not support Lago directly, it's exciting to see more options emerging. Their content marketing has been particularly impressive on HN and in general.
With metering, entitlement management, CPQ, feature gating, and everything else required in a modern SaaS company, the PriceOps space can be quite complex for developers.
Congratulations on the launch and best of luck!
I submitted separately [0] your blogpost "Open-source licensing and why Lago chose AGPLv3" [1]. I find this a refreshing and good read that counters the usual FUD so many people raise when hearing about the AGPL. In the article is mentioned Plausible [2] who also managed to create a great business this way, and in direct competition to Google Analytics. Well done.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34773891
https://www.getlago.com/blog/open-source-licensing-and-why-l...
https://plausible.io
I'm a cofounder at Lotus (https://github.com/uselotus/lotus).
First, congrats on the launch Lago. I've been very impressed with your ability to educate devs about the intricacies of billing and you are certainly pushing the entire space forward.
While you offer coupons and credit notes, there are features you don't have that we have prioritized and built, including, usage alerts, plan versioning, gauge metrics, custom sql etc. etc. Point being I think its unfair to say we are a subset of your product.
In addition, we have a 25+ year billing expert on our team who has been CTO of a startup processing $300 million a year.
Lastly, I don't think it's fair to make statements about our customers just because we haven't "announced" them yet.
Happy to chat more with anyone about our differences.
https://github.com/getlago/lago-api/tree/619a7a53f98d9a19908...
Lago is much closer the production ready however. Solid stand-alone tool already.
Tier like projects gives me hope to build for better embedded user experience and more control in the future.