Open Source Metering and Usage Based Billing
Open Source Metering & Usage-Based Billing
The best alternative to Chargebee, Recurly or Stripe Billing.
For usage-based, subscription-based, and all the nuances of pricing in between.
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The programmable API for usage-based billing
The problem: Billing systems are still a nightmare for engineers
Read more first-hand experiences from Qonto, Algolia, Pleo, Segment, or the 350+. Hackernews comments here.
The Solution: Lago, the open-source billing API for product-led SaaS
Open-source, open architecture:
✨ Features
🔔 Stay up to date
Lago launched its v0.1 on June 2nd, 2022. Lots of new features are coming, and are generally released on a bi-weekly basis. Watch updates of this repository to be notified of future updates.
🔖 License
Distributed under the AGPLv3 License. Read more here.
💻 Deploy locally Requirements
Run the app
To start using Lago, run the following commands in a shell:
# Get the code
git clone https://github.com/getlago/lago.git
Go to Lago folder
cd lago
Set up environment configuration
echo "LAGO_RSA_PRIVATE_KEY=\"openssl genrsa 2048 | base64
\"" >> .env
source .env
Start
docker-compose up
You can now open your browser and go to http://localhost to connect to the application. Lago's API is exposed at http://localhost:3000.
Find your API key
Your API Key can be found directly in the UI:
Analytics and tracking
Please note that Lago, by default, tracks basic actions performed on your self-hosted instance. If you do not disable tracking, you may receive specific communications or product updates. However, rest assured that Lago will not collect any personal information about your customers or financial information about your invoices.
If you would like to know more about Lago's analytics or remove the entire tracking, please refer to this page for comprehensive information.
Version, environment variables and components
Docker images are always updated to the last stable version in the docker-compose.yml file. You can use a different tag if needed by checking the releases list.
Lago uses the following environment variables to configure the components of the application. You can override them to customise your setup. Take a closer look are our documentation.
☁️ Use our cloud-based product
Contact our team at hello@getlago.com to get started with Lago Cloud. More information on our website.
🚀 Getting the most out of Lago
🧑💻 Contributions and development environment
You can follow this guide to set up a Lago development environment on your machine. This guide is intended for people willing to contribute to Lago. If you want to try Lago on your local system, we recommend that you take a look at Lago's public documentation.
You can contribute by following our guidelines.
💡 Philosophy
B2B SaaS has evolved, but billing has not yet.
1- We’re not in the “subscription economy” anymore. And we won’t go “full usage-based pricing” quite yet
Pricings are now mostly hybrid: they include a usage-based component (i.e. “if you use more you pay more”) and a subscription component (i.e. a recurring fee for basic usage).
Not all software companies will go full “usage-based” like Snowflake for instance. This model is the new standard for cloud infrastructure products. However, in other areas of SaaS, users want to know beforehand how much they will pay to control their spending and software companies want to be able to predict recurring revenues.
2- Go-to-market is not either bottom-up or top-down anymore
SaaS used to be either self-service (SMBs) or sales-led (Enterprises). Go-to-market now mixes the self-service (all customers access the same price plans) and sales-led (customers get a custom quote from a sales representative) motions. A typical journey involves an individual contributor in a company who tests a new tool, puts their corporate credit card in, and starts spreading the use of the tool within the organization. At that point, the VP or head of department might want to upgrade to a custom plan tailored to the needs of the whole organization. As a result, billing needs to be flexible, automated, and transparent enough to embrace this hybrid go-to-market motion as well.
3- The “rent seeker” pricing of current billing solutions needs to stop
Why do payment companies take a cut on revenues? Because the higher the amount, the higher the risk for them (e.g. fraud, disputes, etc.).
Why did billing companies adopt the same pricing structure? We’re not able to provide an answer that makes sense. It’s been said on the internet that they did this because they could (read more here).
One last thing…
Lago is agnostic and we aim at being as transparent as possible, so we won’t nudge or lock you into using a specific tool in exchange for using our billing API (learn more).
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