I tried to use it for a new SaaS product - but their plans start at 3000$/mo.
It seems like they have things backwards. The small fry like me don't want to self-host, we want a managed solution. The big fishes have enough scale to self-host.
It seems like they have things backwards. The small fry like me don't want to self-host, we want a managed solution. The big fishes have enough scale to self-host.
But a few years in we were doing substantial volume and we wanted to re-negotiate the contract. If we had Lago and could re-integrate with that, using it as leverage on a Stripe contract renewal, that could have been worth $3k a month, given that we were paying Stripe $30k per month in fees.
Our situation was a little different being retail rather than SaaS billing, but I could see a world where this makes financial sense.
We ended up talking to about 5 different usage based billing API providers and basically no one is interested in servicing the sub $1000 per month market which is where we will realistically be for the next year as we grow.
Additionally lago and other providers advertise "no revenue cut" and then always quote pricing as a percentage of revenue (which is technical not a revenue cut except your fee scales pretty linarly with revenue).
Presumably because "no one was interested" in taking their business?
We talked to this many providers because it’s a huge pain point for us and the thing we hacked together was inadequate for tracking usage.
It's pricing genius to avoid the small, expensive to service, unprofitable customers (let Stripe lose money on those), and then they cherry pick the good customers once that have already scaled up at Stripe
If it does go places, I'm happy to pay the big fees when it gets big.
IMHO this is why Stripe is so successful - picking up the customers while they're small. I'm with Stripe because Adyen et. al wouldn't talk to me at $100/mo but Stripe would, and many years later I'm still with Stripe running a large multiple of that through them (ok, via Paddle now..)
For a discussion around payments this seems very similar to the "internet is a utility" discussion from decades past with a weird anti-capitalist / "a private company doing this is bad" vibes.
They have open source / no support billing, so why wouldn't use use that? They also have an up to 50% discount for early-stage companies.