Launch HN: Lago (YC S21) – Open-source usage-based billing

I'm a big fan of usage based billing. It lets small users have small bills.

Per-seat pricing has always felt annoying to me. Ideally you want everyone at your company to be able to access the tools that everyone else uses (you don't want to create a bunch of second class citizens), but that gets really expensive really quickly. So per-user-per-month has never felt great to me.

That said, usage-based billing is confusing. And when customers are confused, they simply chargeback the credit card charge. AWS can make it work, but I'm not sure if everyone else can. Will be interesting to see.

I have been keeping track of Lago's team for a while now, and I am continually impressed by their achievements and the speed at which they are delivering. Congratulations on the launch!

I submitted separately [0] your blogpost "Open-source licensing and why Lago chose AGPLv3" [1]. I find this a refreshing and good read that counters the usual FUD so many people raise when hearing about the AGPL. In the article is mentioned Plausible [2] who also managed to create a great business this way, and in direct competition to Google Analytics. Well done.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34773891

https://www.getlago.com/blog/open-source-licensing-and-why-l...

https://plausible.io

Yes, there are many differences between Stripe and Lago. Here are some of the most common:

Lago is completely agnostic of payment providers, meaning you can use any payment service provider (PSP) with it, whereas Stripe requires the use of its entire stack.

Lago is event-based, making it easy to ingest a high volume of usage-based components. This eliminates the need for users to manually bill their own usage-based billing aggregation on top of Stripe.

Lago is open-source, so there is no revenue taken as a cut. For its fully cloud-hosted version, Lago prices a platform fee and tiers on usage-based events, making it more scalable for high-volume companies. Additionally, its open architecture allows for full customization to fit your needs.

Thanks! We're big fans of Plausible and appreciate you mentioning them in your comment. We wanted to be transparent about why we chose this license. Our goal is to create a sustainable open source product, both in terms of quality and vision.