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

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

#121

Post by AnhTho_FR »

abbm wrote: post #112

This looks great, well done. At a previous company we had a relatively simple billing structure, but it was unusual in that it was usage based + an honesty system (clients could elect to not pay in any given instance if the product didn't add value in that instance). Add to that, the client often wouldn't know whether the product added value until weeks or months after the usage. We ended up writing our own billing s…

Thanks! We’re working hard to create content to explain why billing isn’t that trivial to avoid this kind of situations!

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

#122

Post by nonethewiser »

AnhTho_FR wrote: post #110
nonethewiser wrote: post #107

How are you able to build something like this while only paying engineers 50k/yr? https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/lago/jobs

The job post includes a range: $50K-100K and the location is set to "Bogota / Paris". I had researched compensations in these markets and the range seemed relevant. We definitely pay competitive salaries, place the bar quite high and adjust it based on the candidates we meet.

Interesting. Wouldn't have thought a range including 50k/yr would be competitive.

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

#124

Post by Kiro »

mikaeln wrote: post #116
nylonstrung wrote: post #31

How do you guys differ from Lotus, the other YC open-source usage based billing company?

I'm a cofounder at Lotus ( https://github.com/uselotus/lotus ). First, congrats on the launch Lago. I've been very impressed with your ability to educate devs about the intricacies of billing and you are certainly pushing the entire space forward. While you offer coupons and credit notes, there are features you don't have that we have prioritized and built, including, usage alerts, plan versioning, gauge metrics, cus…

You replied to the wrong comment.

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

#125

Post by kdeldycke »

perlgeek wrote: post #103
telecuda wrote: post #61

Congrats! We built a usage-based telephony (voice & sms) billing system for our customers and appreciate the pain. Not to take anything away from your launch, but founders / product managers should carefully consider if usage-billing (even with a tool like Lago) is best for your business and customers. We started as usage-based then learned a few years in (once we understood customer usage trends - key) that customer…

I work at an IT service provider that also offers some cloud products. Customers start out by wanting all the flexibility (for their devs, usually) to spin up their owner servers, and want used-based billing. It would be a waste to pay more, no? Then their own book keeping department yells at them, because they use SAP, and every bill that differs from the contract or the previous month is sheer hell and requires 5 l…

> "cloud points" per month so that the invoice remains constant

So true. At one point Google Ads had a BillingCap enum in their APIs, used to set up "capped actuals", a scheme also known as "monthly with rollover". Something that I understood as selling monthly quotas of a consumable, or as you put it, "cloud points".

My notes points to: https://developers.google.com/ad-manager/api/reference/v2019... . But this URL is broken and I can't find any trace of "capped actuals" anywhere in Google's documentation. I guess it was probably rebranded/refactored into budgets/monthly spending limit/monthly invoicing/whatever.

At the end I think "points" is a better way to sell this feature. If this is generic enough, it can be an answer to airlines' miles and similar loyalty programs the retail industry is fond of.

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

#127

Post by bobolino123 »

nonethewiser wrote: post #122
AnhTho_FR wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The job post includes a range: $50K-100K and the location is set to "Bogota / Paris". I had researched compensations in these markets and the range seemed relevant. We definitely pay competitive salaries, place the bar quite high and adjust it based on the candidates we meet.

Interesting. Wouldn't have thought a range including 50k/yr would be competitive.

50k in Bogota probably and 60-75k in Paris.

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

#128

Post by kdeldycke »

jrockway wrote: post #11
candiddevmike wrote: post #5

I think this is going to be/already is a crowded space. SaaS companies are feeling the burn of layoffs due to per-seat pricing, so metered billing seems like a good alternative. Unfortunately, as a SaaS consumer, I despise it, as it's meant to be obtuse and hard to estimate, plus I have yet to see any SaaS/IaaS offer real spend controls like stopping the service.

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 confus…

Small bills are cool, until it's too small.

I remember having to negotiate with Stripe the removal of their lowest limits. The quantum of unit I was billing on my cloud platform was such that you could consume just enough CPU and storage to end up with a $0.01 invoice at the end of the month.

It was impossible for Stripe to process this payment. IIRC their lowest limit was $0.50 or $0.10. I guess they had this limit in place to prevent abuse and limit fraud. As we had similar hard-coded heuristics for the same reasons.

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

#129

Post by kdeldycke »

rileyphone wrote: post #30

Brad Cox laid out a scheme similar to this in hopes of solving the software crisis, in his 1995 book Superdistribution. Now, it wasn't really technically feasible when software was local and native, but in the cloud era it makes a lot more sense. I've personally felt the pain of creating a bespoke multitiered billing system so I appreciate what you're trying to do here, good luck!

This book? https://www.amazon.com/Superdistribution-Objects-Property-El...

Strong vibes of the dot-com era reading the description but there's probably one or two insights there worth revisiting. Ordered! :)

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

#130

Post by AnhTho_FR »

0xferruccio wrote: post #126

What’s the advantage of open source usage based pricing? Does this product solve the charging part of the problem or the customer portal admin part of billing?

Question 1: composability (pick only what you want to use), code transparency (you can know exactly how Lago works, so that you don’t use a black box for billing), and the ability to customise our API to your edge cases Question 2: we focused on building a user interface for the merchant, and an API for the back-end. We’re working hard to add the customer portal (that the merchant’s customer sees when they manage their account) now!
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