FAQ
About Lago
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, $640M raised at $6 billion valuation), Accel-backed Swan (Embedded banking), Together.ai (AI, $102.5M raised at $1.25 billion valuation) or Groq (AI, $300M raised at $2.5 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
Real-time usage metering
Lago’s event-based architecture provides a solid foundation for building a
fair pricing model that scales with your business.
Flexible plan configuration
Lago supports all pricing models. Create pay-as-you-go and hybrid plans in
no time with our intuitive user interface or API.
Coupons and discounts
Create engaging marketing campaigns and increase conversion with coupons
that customers can redeem to get a discount.
Coupons and discounts
Create engaging marketing campaigns and increase conversion with coupons
that customers can redeem to get a discount.
Add-ons and one-off invoices
Lago allows you to create one-time charges that are invoiced on the fly.
Invoices generation
Depending on the configuration of your plans, Lago automatically calculates
what each customer owes you and generates invoices.
Prepaid credits
Unlock recurring revenue opportunities for pay-as-you-go pricing models with
Lago’s prepaid credit features.
Integrations
Lago Billing takes integration to the next level, seamlessly integrating
with every aspect of your business operations.
Instant charges
Charge customers instantly while retaining the freedom to choose whether or
not to generate an invoice for the transaction.
Customer portal
Effortlessly integrate the customer portal into your application, providing
your customers with seamless access to detailed usage information and
invoice data.
Spending minimums
Take control of your billing process by establishing minimum spending limits
for charges. With our platform, you can easily define the minimum amount
customers must meet for a usage-based component.
Email invoices
Providing a seamless integration of email communication with the billing
engine, allowing businesses to send professional invoices directly to their
customers’ inbox.
Grace periods
Have the flexibility to make adjustments to customers’ usage, even after the
billing cycle has ended. Fine-tune and modify usage details, ensuring that
you have complete control over your invoicing.
Billing timezones
Simplify international billing. Bill your customers according to their
respective timezones.
Credit notes and refunds
Unlock customer satisfaction with credit notes issuance and customer
refunds. Streamline your operations and foster trust by handling credit
notes and refunds through our UI and API.
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.