Lago

Lago is an open-source, real-time, event-based metering and billing solution designed for businesses with complex pricing needs. It empowers engineers, product, and finance teams to implement flexible usage-based and subscription models that scale without limits. By offering robust control and transparency, Lago solves the challenges of outgrowing traditional billing platforms and managing intricate monetization strategies.

Key Features

• ⚡ Real-Time Event-Based Metering: Seamlessly connect your data sources as they are, eliminating the need for complex pre-aggregation or cleaning. Lago's event-based architecture provides the granular foundation needed to accurately track and bill for any customer usage, ensuring fairness and scalability for your pricing models.

• ⚙️ Flexible Pricing Model Engine: Design and implement virtually any pricing strategy, from simple subscriptions and seat-based plans to intricate usage-based and hybrid models with tiers or minimum commitments. You can configure these plans rapidly via an intuitive UI or API, adapting to evolving market demands.

• 🧾 Automated Invoicing & Payments: Streamline your financial operations with automatic invoice generation that precisely calculates customer dues, including fees and taxes. Lago also integrates with leading payment providers, allowing for efficient collection and management of your revenue streams.

• 💰 Advanced Monetization Tools: Drive growth and enhance customer engagement with built-in features like customizable coupons for marketing campaigns and prepaid credits. Prepaid credits enable you to unlock new recurring revenue opportunities, particularly for pay-as-you-go offerings.

• 🔒 Open-Source Composability & Control: Gain unparalleled transparency and control with Lago's open-source core. You can build custom functionalities on top, audit the code for security, and maintain all your sensitive billing data within your own infrastructure, ensuring maximum data privacy and flexibility.

Use Cases

• Launch New Products with Complex Usage Tiers: A SaaS company introduces a new API service where pricing varies by call volume, data processed, and premium feature usage. Lago enables them to define these intricate usage metrics, create tiered pricing plans, and automatically bill customers accurately without manual data reconciliation.

• Transition to Flexible Usage-Based Models: An existing subscription-based software company wants to offer more flexible, pay-as-you-go options to attract new customer segments. With Lago, they can easily build and manage hybrid plans, integrating both recurring fees and variable usage charges, while tracking customer consumption in real-time.

• Enhance Customer Acquisition and Retention: A product-led growth company aims to incentivize sign-ups and reward loyal customers. They leverage Lago's coupon functionality to offer introductory discounts and utilize prepaid credits to encourage early commitment, driving conversion and fostering customer loyalty.

Unique Advantages

• Unrivaled Data Control & Privacy: Unlike many proprietary solutions, Lago's open-source nature allows you to host billing data within your own infrastructure. This provides complete control, auditability of the code, and ensures your sensitive customer and financial information never leaves your environment.

• True Plug-and-Play Metering: Lago eliminates the common headache of data pre-aggregation. You can connect your data sources directly, and Lago intelligently handles the rest, allowing you to focus on defining your billing logic rather than tedious data preparation. This directly contrasts with systems that often require extensive data manipulation before billing.

• Designed for Complex Billing Logic: Positioned as a superior alternative to Chargebee, Recurly, or Stripe Billing for nuanced requirements, Lago fully supports an expansive range of pricing models—from intricate usage tiers and minimum commitments to hybrid subscriptions—empowering you to monetize any product with precision.

• Transparent & Fair Pricing: Lago offers a free self-hosted version and a cloud version priced like a SaaS, explicitly avoiding the "rent seeker" model of taking a percentage of your revenue. This commitment to fair pricing ensures your billing solution scales economically with your business.

• Engineer-First & Business-Ready: With a robust API for developers and a pixel-perfect UI for business and finance teams, Lago provides an out-of-the-box billing system that reduces the need to build components independently. This accelerates development while maintaining operational ease.

Conclusion

Lago stands as a robust, flexible, and transparent billing solution, perfectly suited for companies evolving beyond basic subscription models. It empowers engineering, product, and finance teams to implement sophisticated usage-based and hybrid pricing, ensuring scalability and complete control over your monetization strategy. Explore how Lago can transform your billing operations and unlock new revenue possibilities.