Lago has thousands of users, thousands of stars on Github and great investors. Lago is the most popular open-source repository solving for billing on Github, to give you a point of reference, the second most popular one was started ten years ago, Lago caught up fast! It has been chosen by companies like:

  • Pennylane – the best Quickbooks alternative for SMBs, backed by Sequoia Capital.
  • Swan – the leading European Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS), backed by Accel and Creandum.
  • Flipside Crypto – a leading provider of on-demand analytics and business intelligence for blockchain, backed by CoinBase Ventures.

and many more. To hear firsthand experiences from our users, explore Lago’s love wall.

2. Is the software updated regularly?

We release new versions every 2-3 weeks, our team is working relentlessly to improve the product. Sign up to our newsletter, or follow us on Linkedin or X (fka Twitter). Our past product updates are here.

3. How is this different from the other billing tools?

Lago is the only open source metering and usage-based billing solution. A lot of closed source (aka ‘SaaS’) solutions exist (e.g., Chargebee, Stripe Billing, Zuora) but they require you to send your data to third-parties, to blindly trust a ‘black box’ with your most critical internal system (billing / revenue) and they take a cut on your revenue. Some billing solutions will even force you to only use another of their product, for instance: if you use ‘Stripe Billing’, you can only use one payment processor, called ‘Stripe Payments’.

We have put together these product comparisons if you want to go further.

There are multiple open source billing offerings - Invoice Plane, myBillBook etc. However, Lago is the only open source software that gives you:

  1. Real-time event-based usage metering (you won’t need to handle any consumption calculation on your side)
  2. Subscription billing
  3. Hybrid plans, mixing subscription and consumption (e.g., a usage-based billing plan that requires a recurring minimum spend per month)
  4. A full fledge API to automate ‘self-serve/product-led’ plans, and an intuitive no-code user interface to configure ‘custom/enterprise’ plans
  5. Additional features including: instant charges, modular couponing, spending minimums, grace periods, etc.