Show HN: Lotus – Open source pricing and packaging infrastructure

Hi HN! We’re building an open-source pricing & packaging engine for SaaS with a built-in billing system. (https://github.com/uselotus/lotus).

We strongly believe pricing is the largest untapped growth lever for SaaS, primarily because pricing affects so many critical systems that don’t talk to each other (billing, payments, feature limits, metering, and CRM). We’re building this infrastructure to fix this and enable quick experimentation.

Lotus acts as a central repository for all of your pricing plans and utilizes your payment gateway, to manage usage-based, per-seat, and custom enterprise pricing. We’re excited to open-source this because we want to enable developers to build their custom pricing and integration edge cases on top of this base.

We’ve launched this repo under an MIT license so any developer can use the tool. Give it a spin for us at either:

* test our cloud version at (https://demo.uselotus.io)

* self-host here (https://github.com/uselotus/lotus) and let us know what you think.

All feedback is appreciated! If the project is especially relevant to you, follow us and we’ll keep you updated when we’ve fully published all our beta features.

Show HN: Lotus – Open source pricing and packaging infrastructure
github.com

In 2022, managing different pricing options for Saas is still an awful experience - good to see someone trying to fix this.

Is this basically a stripe alternative?

Not quite. Lotus doesn't facilitate payments. Our job ends after we calculate the invoice a customer owes. We integrate with Stripe (working on Bill.com integration) so you can change customers through their payment gateway.

Lotus offers metering, a simpler frontend to iterate on plans, pricing experiments, and actual feature entitlements in our plans so that both the price and the features in a plan live in the same place. Stripe doesn't offer these components.

Looks potentially interesting to us at Sourcegraph. We built pricing, metering, and license keys into our product ourselves a few years ago because (1) nothing like this existed at the time and (2) a large portion of our customer base was (and still is) self-hosted, so we couldn't depend on some cloud service. Our code is all public, in case you want to poke around and see if it'd be a good solution for us.