Lago is an open-source, API-first billing infrastructure platform designed to manage usage-based, hybrid, and subscription pricing models. The solution provides a programmable billing engine that allows developers to define meters and pricing logic as code, intended to eliminate the need for custom internal billing systems for high-volume event data.

Key Capabilities

Real-Time Usage Metering: Ingests raw events (e.g., API calls, token consumption, compute seconds) via an event-driven architecture to track billable metrics at scale.
Flexible Pricing Engine: Supports multi-dimensional models including pay-as-you-go, tiered pricing, volume discounts, prepaid credits, and hybrid structures that combine fixed recurring fees with variable usage.
Automated Billing & Invoicing: Generates invoices based on real-time consumption data, including automated handling of proration, upgrades, downgrades, and multi-currency/tax logic (e.g., VAT, GST).
Entitlements & Feature Flags: Manages feature access and usage limits directly within the billing layer to align product access with subscription tiers and credit balances.
Payment Orchestration: Integrates with payment gateways such as Stripe, Adyen, and GoCardless to manage automated collections, dunning workflows, and retry logic.
Revenue Analytics: Provides dashboards for monitoring Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), net revenue, and usage-to-revenue correlation.

Audience & Use Cases

Audience: Software engineers, product managers, and finance operations teams at SaaS and AI organizations.
Use Case: Implementing consumption-based billing for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), managing complex AI model usage costs, and providing white-labeled billing interfaces for multi-tenant platforms.

Technical Specifications

Architecture: Event-driven system with a core built on Ruby on Rails.
Deployment Options: Available as a managed Cloud service or an Open-Source/Self-Hosted edition for organizations requiring full data sovereignty.
Security & Compliance: SOC 2 Type II certified and GDPR compliant.
Integrations: Native support for Salesforce, HubSpot, NetSuite, and Avalara.

Lago

What is Lago?

Categories & Use Cases

Lago Alternatives