Lago (YC S21) – Open-Source Stripe Billing and Chargebee Alternative Is Hiring

Lago

Open Source Metering and Usage Based Billing

We’re the open-source billing API for usage-based, subscription-based, and all the nuances of pricing in between.
With Lago, you can make your billing fit your pricing and business workflows, not the other way around.

Our Story

We built a custom billing system from scratch for Qonto.com, a 5x Fintech unicorn in Europe.
That was not the best use of our engineers’ time (it’s complex to build and to maintain), but we felt ‘trapped’:

• We did not want to hack around Stripe Billing, or Chargebee, or any of the equivalents to customize it: our pricing was a mix of subscription-based and usage-based, and the existing tools were built for subscription-based businesses
• We did not want to leave precious % of revenue on the table. We resented their rent-seeker approach, and their closed architecture in general, with data being locked in another product.
  So we went for a home-made billing system, which was far from being perfect.

Lago aims at fixing this problem at scale, with an open architecture by design.

Our Mission

Lago is on a mission to pioneer a ‘Modern Pricing Stack’*, for Product Led companies.

• Pricing and all its components (billing, payments, invoicing, cash collection, etc.) are one of the most critical business pillars, and are yet to be systemized.
• Billing and pricing questions are still one of the most common sources of customer support tickets, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
• Incumbent pricing tools have been built around a “closed architecture” mindset: keeping critical data locked to claim to be the “source of truth”, closing numerous parts of their APIs, only integrating with specific partners to lock you in (e.g., Stripe Billing only working with Stripe Payments), to finally collect a rent-seeker tax on transactions (0.5-1% of revenues).
  We believe in a more open pricing stack, that interconnects with the company’s internal workflows and systems, with a fairer revenue model.

‘* inspired by the ‘Modern Data Stack’ movement (read more here: https://www.fivetran.com/blog/what-is-the-modern-data-stack)

Our Values

• Ambition: we aim big, because otherwise, where is the fun?
• Progress: we care more about the grit, the steep learning curve, the resilience and creativity muscles, than the current status or where you come from.
• Humble confidence: we know our strengths and always strive for excellence, but we also know there’s so much we don’t know yet
• Pay it forward: we’ve all started somewhere, people gave us a hand when we needed one, we don’t forget this, and reinforce this positive cycle
• Not taking ourselves too seriously: we are ambitious, restless learners and hustlers, but at the end of the day, our health (physical and mental), and our loved ones are what matter the most.

Founded:2021

Team Size:9

Location:Paris, France