Open-source API to generate invoices

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • lago

    Open Source Metering and Usage Based Billing API ⭐️ Consumption tracking, Subscription management, Pricing iterations, Payment orchestration & Revenue analytics

  • all the Lago' api, what we call backend is open source, you can check it out there https://github.com/getlago/lago

  • node-microinvoice

    Fast & elegant PDF invoice generator for Node using PDFKit. No Puppeteer

  • Not sure this actually solves a real problem. A lot of the questions/problems mentioned in the article are already things being addressed by any service worth using.

    At the end of the day, you just need to generate a PDF from a template. The template is a solved problem. Invoices generally do not have that huge amount of variability in terms of layout.

    I have been using microinvoice (https://github.com/baptistejamin/node-microinvoice) for the past couple of months and it's been a breeze. It uses PDFKit underneathe and has been working really well. I don't think PDF generation is a task that should require using Chromium. There's pandoc & other libraries that can easily do this at a much lower cost to both resources and finance.

    The blog posts sounds like its solving a problem that doesn't exist. Generating invoices _at scale_? Is scalibility really a problem here? Generating a PDF takes a couple of milliseconds. Rent a $5 VPS and it can generate all sorts of PDFs for you without an issue for a long time before you'd start worrying about scalability. Heck this sort of thing doesn't even need to be a dedicated service.

    Not to downplay anyone's hard work but Lago just doesn't sound like it's solving a real problem.

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    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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  • lago-api

    Open Source Metering and Usage Based Billing

  • I only did a cursory look but it looks like the backend for the API is on their Github licensed under AFGL.

    https://github.com/getlago/lago-api/

  • WeasyPrint

    The awesome document factory

  • I have PTSD from 20 years ago trying to convert OpenOffice documents to PDF with ReportLab. It was janky because all elements had to be positioned in absolute coordinates to the virtual page.

    Nowadays I'll go straight to https://weasyprint.org to produce PDFs in Python. That's what I used for https://scaleway.com invoices.

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