Lago

Overview

Lago is an open-source billing platform that handles usage-based, subscription, and hybrid pricing. You can self-host it or use the managed cloud version. The codebase is on GitHub, the license is permissive, and you can inspect, modify, or fork every line.

This matters more now than it did a year ago. Stripe’s acquisition of Metronome means the leading proprietary usage-based billing platform is no longer independent. If you want usage-based billing without vendor lock-in — especially if you have data residency requirements or want to own your billing infrastructure — Lago is the primary open-source alternative.

Lago’s customers include Mistral.ai, Synthesia, and PayPal. The platform has $22M in total funding led by FirstMark, with backing from Y Combinator and angel investors from Stripe, OpenAI, and Hugging Face.

Best For

Teams that want full control over their billing infrastructure. Lago is the right choice when you need usage-based billing, want to avoid proprietary lock-in, or have compliance requirements (data residency, GDPR, SOC 2) that make self-hosting attractive. Also a strong fit for companies that want to customize billing logic at the source code level.

Strengths

• Open source with real traction. Apache 2.0 licensed, 9,000+ GitHub stars, active community. This is not a toy project — production companies run on it
• Self-host or managed. Deploy on your own infrastructure for full data control, or use the cloud version. Most billing platforms don’t give you this choice
• Usage-based billing as a core feature. Event ingestion, real-time metering, and flexible pricing models — not bolted on, built in
• No vendor lock-in. If Lago disappears tomorrow, you have the code. After the Metronome acquisition, this independence has real strategic value
• Enterprise compliance. SOC 2 Type 2 certified, GDPR-aligned, audit logs, 99.9% SLA on managed. Self-hosted gives you full data sovereignty
• Expanding beyond billing. Dunning, collections, e-invoicing compliance (including French e-invoicing ahead of the September 2026 mandate), and revenue analytics are in active development

Trade-offs

• Self-hosting is real work. You’re running infrastructure: deployments, upgrades, monitoring, scaling. If your team doesn’t have DevOps capacity, use the managed version or choose a fully managed platform instead
• Smaller ecosystem. Fewer pre-built integrations than Stripe, Chargebee, or Recurly. You may need to build connectors for your specific stack
• Still maturing. Some features are less polished than established commercial alternatives. The pace of development is fast, but gaps exist
• Requires a payment processor. Like Orb, Lago handles metering and invoicing — not payment collection. You’ll pair it with Stripe or another processor

Ready to start?

• Try Lago