Welcome to Lago
Lago is an open-source Stripe Billing alternative.
This library will allow you to build an entire billing logic from scratch, even the most complex one. Lago is a real-time event-based library made for usage-based billing, subscription-based billing, and all the nuances of pricing in between.
You can decide to use Lago in its self-hosted version or in its cloud version (fully hosted by Lago), currently available on a per request basis. Request access to Lago Cloud here.
Four-step billing workflow
1. Event ingestion
Events provide information about your customers' consumption, with the highest level of granularity. Any product feature for which you want to charge your customers should correspond to a specific event. An event can be triggered by an action or can be sent periodically. Lago is able to ingest events at scale while preventing duplicates.
2. Metrics aggregation
The aggregation process consists in converting events into billable metrics. There are four aggregation types:
| Aggregation | Description |
|---|---|
| COUNT | Counts the number of times an incoming event occurs |
| SUM | Calculates the sum of a predefined property for incoming events |
| MAX | Returns the maximum value of a predefined property for incoming events |
| COUNT DISTINCT | Returns the number of unique values of a predefined property for incoming events |
3. Pricing
Creating plans allows you to define how much your customers should pay for using your product. You can then combine plans and billable metrics to implement any billing model (i.e. subscription-based, usage-based, or hybrid). Billable metrics may be priced differently depending on the associated plan.
4. Invoicing
An invoice is generated for each customer at the end of the billing period, as defined in the corresponding plan. Invoices include fees, taxes and customer information.
Next steps
Before you can start defining usage metrics and pricing plans, you must deploy Lago locally.