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Comment by cutenewt | Hacker News Reader

Lago is really gunning for Stripe Billing.

Is Lago barking up the wrong tree? Or is there really an untapped opportunity here?

I’m Raffi from Lago. Frankly, Stripe is a awesome company. They’ve built amazing products, including Stripe Payments (the blog post starts with this exact same statement). When it comes to billing, we do believe we are creating a better solution, especially for companies having complex billing (usage based, for instance). At least, we offer a new solution to prevent additional % fees on revenue, vendor lock-in and rigid billing solution by creating the tool we would have loved to use.

We do not bark up the wrong tree, but try to give our point of view about the perfect billing system

Hi! I work at Lago.

Billing is still a huge nightmare for engineers, this is what we're going after -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31424450

We've built and scaled it internally in a 5x Fintech Unicorn before joining YC, we would have loved to use an off the shelf solution, but none of them were a fit.

If Lago builds a billing UI and API that can connect to Stripe Billing, Paddle, Authorize.net, PayPal, etc. then that is a huge opportunity.

why exactly? is this just some form of xkcd-style "there were too many APIs so i built a superAPI" line of thinking? or is there something more fundamental about this problem you are referring to

Interested in the answer too! Maybe you meant being a 'metering x billing layer' that can easily connect to any PSP, unlike 'Stripe Billing' that is only usable with 'Stripe Payments'?). In that case, we'd connect to 'Stripe Payments' (not Stripe Billing), which we already do :) Genuinely looking forward to your thoughts!

Stripe Billing is not fully internationally available so a lot of software companies are opting for Paddle. A super API would allow users to easily switch between billing platforms and avoid lock-in.

The other reason is that Stripe Billing is stupidly good. So good in fact, that they could raise they rates from 0.5% to 1-1.5% and most people would pay up since migration would cause downtime and man-hours. I use Stripe Billing now, but could integrate with Lago once and easily switch between payment processors.

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