1. What is Lago?
Lago is the leading open-source pricing solution focused on complex billing: multi-product/geographies, transactional, usage-based, subscription hybrids, etc, chosen by unicorns like Mistral (AI, $13.7 billion valuation), Accel-backed Swan (Embedded banking), or Groq (AI, $6.9 billion valuation). Lago is API-first, the most loved billing solution on Github, and was voted Product of the day week, and month on Product Hunt. Lago raised a total of $22M of funding from investors including Y Combinator, FirstMark Capital, SignalFire, Meghan Gill, who has led the monetization efforts of MongoDB for 14 years, Romain Huet, former head of Developer Relations at Stripe - now leading OpenAI developer experience, and Clément Delangue, CEO of AI open platform Hugging Face.2. What does Lago do?
Lago helps businesses calculate how much their end-users need to pay, and make sure they’re paid. This includes, but is not limited to:- Managing subscriptions
- Metering consumption, or usage (e.g., for a telco provider: the number of minutes of a call ; for an electricity provider: the number of kwH used)
- Generating and sending invoices
- Triggering and tracking payments
- Managing customers’ accounts
Usage Metering
Real-time metering for flexible pricing.
Billing & Invoicing
Billing & invoicing without the headaches.
Entitlements
Entitlements managed directly in billing.
Cash Collection
Flexible cash collection for hybrid billing models.
Revenue Analytics
Revenue analytics you can trust, across every stream.
Lago Embedded
White-label billing for platforms and ecosystems.
Lago AI ✨
AI-powered billing intelligence.
Integrations
Enterprise billing integrations that scale with you.
3. What is Lago origin story?
Lago was founded in 2021 by Anh-Tho and Raffi, who were among the earliest employees at Qonto.com – a $5B B2B neobank. They led Qonto’s revenue growth from pre-product to Series D, and built and scaled the monetization system that took the company from 0 to $100M+ of revenue. A fun fact was that when Raffi pitched the idea of Lago to Romain (a senior billing engineer at Qonto), he told him “no way”, and said he did want to quit his position at Qonto but he would “NEVER touch a billing system again”. Step by step, Raffi managed to convince him he could channel this energy and experience to make sure fewer engineers would need to relive the billing nightmares he had to endure. And it worked! At Qonto, they would always underestimate the engineering nightmare billing would create, and learned the hard way about the side effects: delayed launches at best, billing errors, resulting in churning users, and a growing “billing engineering” team that not only was expensive, but very hard to retain. The worst was that at some point, the “pricing strategy” nearly switched to “what’s the easiest option to implement”, rather than “what’s the best for the company”. Raffi and Anh-Tho, and the founding Lago team then spent a lot of time carefully analyzing why no one had solved this huge problem yet, as they thought solid companies like Stripe or Chargebee had partially addressed it. That’s how they built our conviction on the open-source and “platform” approach of Lago, to not be another “buy billing” option, but rather a “Lego ” that engineers build with to create their tailored monetization stack.4. Does it work with my stack?
Yes. Lago is agnostic and can be used via:- Our no-code interface, see it in action here
- Our API
- Our native integrations: Segment, Hightouch, Stripe Payments, Adyen, Salesforce, and many others, here
- One of our backend libraries covering the main programming languages and tools You can use Lago with your stack, whatever it is.