How do you guys differ from Lotus, the other YC open-source usage based billing company?
First, congrats on the launch Lago. I've been very impressed with your ability to educate devs about the intricacies of billing and you are certainly pushing the entire space forward.
While you offer coupons and credit notes, there are features you don't have that we have prioritized and built, including, usage alerts, plan versioning, gauge metrics, custom sql etc. etc. Point being I think its unfair to say we are a subset of your product.
In addition, we have a 25+ year billing expert on our team who has been CTO of a startup processing $300 million a year.
Lastly, I don't think it's fair to make statements about our customers just because we haven't "announced" them yet.
Happy to chat more with anyone about our differences.
First of all, we launched our open source billing repository months before they did. In fact, they even reached out to us for inspiration. This could be related to the fact that our team has prior experience building billing engines, so we have a better understanding of the space.
From a product perspective, our coverage is more extensive. We provide more advanced coupons, usage-based components and billing use-cases. For example, we offer credit notes and refunds, small examples that are not listed in their API. Our product covers more billing edge-cases and deeper features.
Finally, we have customers in production. Our top user is invoicing 5M customers a month, which might not be the case for them.
To conclude, I would assert that we are more advanced.
Focus on why your product is better or different and not these factors like who was early, who has more experience with billing engines etc because again, experience doesn't translate to success necessarily.
All the best.
Hi! Lotus has a great product. We should know, as they reached out to us for inspiration before. Our team has prior experience building billing engines, so we have a very good understanding of the space.
From a product perspective, our coverage is more extensive. We provide more advanced coupons, usage-based components and billing use-cases. For example, we offer credit notes and refunds, small examples that are not listed in their API. Our product covers more billing edge-cases and deeper features.
While we don't know how many customers Lotus has in production, our top user is invoicing 5M customers a month!
Overall, we believe at this point that our product is more advanced. We wish them luck though, the more products in this space the better.