Lago

Lago is an open-source, event-driven billing and metering platform built as a self-hostable alternative to Stripe Billing and Chargebee. We rate it 78/100 — an excellent choice for engineering teams at AI companies, SaaS startups, and infrastructure providers who need full control over their billing infrastructure without vendor lock-in.

What is Lago?

Lago was founded in 2022 by Raffi Sarkissian and Thèophile Brézot, graduates of Y Combinator's W22 batch. The project launched publicly on GitHub on June 2, 2022 and has since grown to 9,500+ stars on GitHub — making it the most popular open-source billing project available. The company has raised over $22 million from Y Combinator, FirstMark Capital, and other investors.

The core problem Lago solves is that building usage-based or hybrid billing in-house is notoriously complex — handling events at scale, proration, credit notes, tax, metering accuracy, and invoice generation typically takes months of engineering time. Lago provides a complete API and UI to do all of this in days, while letting you self-host for full data control or use their cloud offering.

Key Features of Lago

• Event-Based Metering: Lago ingests raw usage events via a REST API and processes up to 15,000 billing events per second, aggregating them into billable metrics with support for sum, count, max, and unique count aggregation types.
• Flexible Pricing Plans: Build pay-as-you-go, subscription, hybrid, and tiered pricing models using a no-code UI or via the API. Supports volume pricing, package pricing, and graduated rates out of the box.
• Invoicing and PDF Generation: Lago auto-generates professional PDF invoices via Gotenberg, handles tax calculations (including Anrok and Avalara integrations), and supports multi-currency billing.
• Credit System: Native prepaid credit wallet for credit-burning pricing models (common in AI APIs), with real-time balance tracking and expiry policies.
• Payment Orchestration: Direct integrations with Stripe, Adyen, GoCardless, and MoneyHash for automatic payment collection without additional glue code.
• Entitlements: Manage feature flags and usage entitlements directly within the billing system — no separate tool required for plan-based feature gating.
• Revenue Analytics: Built-in dashboards for MRR, churn, and cross-stream revenue visibility, plus data pipeline integrations with ClickHouse, Amazon S3, and Segment.
• Lago Embedded: White-label billing infrastructure for platforms that want to offer billing-as-a-feature to their own customers, with full tenant isolation and custom branding.

What Users Say About Lago

On Product Hunt, Lago's initial launch earned over 1,200 votes and became Product of the Day, Week, and Month — unusually strong reception for a developer infrastructure tool. Reviewers consistently praise the no-code UI and the quality of the REST API, with several founders noting that Lago let them implement usage-based billing in under a week where previous attempts had taken months. On Reddit, engineering teams in r/SaaS and r/devops highlight the self-hosting story as a major differentiator for startups concerned about data privacy and billing costs at scale. The most common critique across Product Hunt comments and independent reviews (including from Orb's competitive analysis) is that the cloud pricing is opaque — Lago does not publish pricing on their website, requiring a sales conversation, which frustrates smaller teams who want to evaluate costs upfront. A minority of GitHub issues cite Docker setup complexity as a friction point for teams without DevOps experience.

Lago Pricing

Lago's pricing is structured around three tiers, though exact dollar amounts for cloud plans require contacting sales:

Plan	Price	Key Features
Open Source	$0 (self-hosted)	Full feature set, self-hosted, MIT-adjacent license, community support via GitHub/Slack
Business	Contact sales	Lago Cloud, data pipeline integration (ClickHouse, S3, Segment), invoice preview API, business hours support, Slack channel
Enterprise	Contact sales	Everything in Business + 24/7 premium support, dedicated solutions engineer, VPC/on-prem deployment, SSO, custom SLAs

The open-source version is genuinely full-featured — not a crippled "community edition." You can self-host the complete platform with Docker Compose and run production billing workloads at no cost beyond your own infrastructure.

Who Should Use Lago?

Best for: AI API companies and SaaS startups with credit-burning, pay-as-you-go, or tiered usage pricing. Platform companies that want to embed billing capabilities for their own customers (Lago Embedded). Engineering teams with DevOps capacity who want full data ownership and want to avoid per-transaction fees from managed billing providers.

Not ideal for: Non-technical founders or small teams without engineering resources to manage self-hosted infrastructure. Teams that need pre-built subscription management with zero setup — for those, Stripe Billing or Paddle will be faster to launch with. Companies with purely flat-rate subscription pricing who don't need metering complexity.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Truly open-source and self-hostable — multiple Product Hunt reviewers confirmed full production deployments in under a week
• Processes up to 15,000 events/second — designed for AI and infrastructure workloads, not just traditional SaaS
• Native prepaid credit wallet — critical for AI API pricing, not available in most billing tools without custom code
• Extensive integration ecosystem: Stripe, Adyen, HubSpot, Salesforce, NetSuite, Xero, ClickHouse, and more — 20+ native integrations
• Active development: 9,500+ GitHub stars, $22M+ funding, and weekly commits as of early 2026

Cons:

• Cloud pricing is completely opaque — no published prices, requires a sales call, a recurring complaint from reviewers on G2 and Product Hunt
• Docker-based setup has a learning curve — multiple GitHub issues from teams without DevOps experience struggling with initial deployment
• Documentation gaps exist for edge cases — some advanced billing scenarios require digging into GitHub issues or the community Slack

Alternatives to Lago

Stripe Billing is the default choice for subscription billing but charges 0.5–0.8% of revenue as a platform fee, which becomes expensive at scale — Lago self-hosted eliminates this entirely. Chargebee offers a more polished UI and stronger enterprise sales tooling but is fully managed SaaS with no self-hosting option and higher costs. Orb is a strong direct competitor for usage-based billing in the cloud but is proprietary and VC-backed with no open-source option. OpenMeter focuses specifically on metering without the full billing stack that Lago provides.

Verdict: Is Lago Worth It?

For AI companies, infrastructure providers, and SaaS startups with usage-based pricing, Lago is the best open-source billing option available in 2026. The combination of a genuinely production-ready open-source core, a powerful event-based metering engine, and native prepaid credit support makes it uniquely suited to the AI API billing use case. The cloud pricing opacity and DevOps setup requirements are real friction points, but they don't outweigh the value of owning your billing infrastructure. We rate Lago 78/100 — very good, with room to improve on the documentation and pricing transparency front.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Lago free?

Yes, Lago's open-source version is completely free to self-host with Docker. The full feature set is available, including metering, invoicing, and payment integrations. Cloud (managed) plans require contacting sales for pricing.

What platforms does Lago support?

Lago is a web-based platform accessible via any browser, with a full REST API and official SDKs for Go, JavaScript/Node.js, Python, Ruby, and Java. It can be self-hosted on any Linux server via Docker, or used via Lago Cloud.

How does Lago compare to Stripe Billing?

Stripe Billing charges 0.5–0.8% of revenue processed, which adds up quickly at scale. Lago self-hosted has zero per-transaction fees. Lago also has more advanced metering and credit wallet capabilities, but Stripe is easier to set up for simple subscription models and has better payment method coverage globally.

Is Lago open source?

Yes, Lago is open source and available on GitHub at github.com/getlago/lago. The codebase includes the API (Ruby/Rails), frontend (React), and all core billing logic.

What is the Lago credit wallet?

Lago's credit wallet lets customers prepay and burn credits as they use services — the model popularized by OpenAI and AWS. It tracks real-time balances, supports expiry policies, and automatically deducts from wallets before generating invoices. This is a native feature in Lago, while most competitors require custom implementation.