AnhTho_FR

I'm just surprised no one said they met their SO on HackerNews...? :)

Lago | Open-Source Stripe Billing Alternative| Remote +/- 2h from CET; and/or Paris | Full-Time

https://www.getlago.com/

We're hiring:

- 1 Product Manager https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/lago/jobs/WZQKgQm-sr-p... - Back-end engineers (Ruby), Front-end engineers (React) : job descriptions will be published soon but you can have a sense of what we're building via our repo https://github.com/getlago/lago or doc https://doc.getlago.com/

Apply via the link or email talent@getlago.com for any question!

Thanks! Really appreciate it!

Lago |https://www.getlago.com/ | REMOTE | Full-time | Developer Relations Engineer

Lago is the open-source Stripe Billing alternative. We're looking for our Founding Developer Relations Engineer.

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/lago/jobs/PxLXQzY-deve...

https://github.com/getlago/lago

To apply, email me at : anhtho at getlago . co[m].

Any resources to recommend?

Do you offer a cloud version as well? Congrats, looks like a lot of open source communities might need this!

Do you think it’s really too late though? Aren’t we just at the beginnings?

Lago | Developer Relations Engineer | Europe (hybrid) | https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/lago/jobs/PxLXQzY-deve...

Lago is the Open Source Stripe Billing / Chargebee alternative, we're hiring our 1st Developer Relations engineer.

https://github.com/getlago/lago https://www.getlago.com/

Not the strongest business metric but it shows developers’ attention and a signal that people somehow care or want what is built.

The strongest metrics would be revenue, usage in production for large companies, big contributions that are themselves use for real life use cases.

Question 1: composability (pick only what you want to use), code transparency (you can know exactly how Lago works, so that you don’t use a black box for billing), and the ability to customise our API to your edge cases Question 2: we focused on building a user interface for the merchant, and an API for the back-end. We’re working hard to add the customer portal (that the merchant’s customer sees when they manage their account) now!

Thanks! We’re working hard to create content to explain why billing isn’t that trivial to avoid this kind of situations!

I think B2B users would rather dispute the invoice with their account manager and might get a discount.

We have seen it into the form of « fair usage ». Although I understand it from a merchant’s perceptive, I have not seen it well received by end users… yet.

I heard they only fully automated it post IPO, and have a full team of senior engineers + PM on this topic now!

The job post includes a range: $50K-100K and the location is set to "Bogota / Paris". I had researched compensations in these markets and the range seemed relevant. We definitely pay competitive salaries, place the bar quite high and adjust it based on the candidates we meet.

This really resonates with our observations. I think it's a "business" problem first (pricing) indeed and a technical one (once you've decided on pricing). Your insights are why're very bullish on "hybrid" pricings: usage subscriptions, fixed costs that can be overaged but with prepaid packages or prepaid credits. In that case, the end-user still gets the "we pay what we use", while there's predictability/peace of mind on the final bill (you can't exceed what you prepaid).

This is really what we've observed indeed! The companies catering to later stage companies prefer to offer prepaid credits to their end users, or annual plans paid in advance that includes some prepaid usage than a full, non predictable usage based pricing. I think in that case it's preferable for the end user, but also for the company, as their finance team can have more visibility on the upcoming revenue streams.

Yes, it's definitely very YC to work on multiple launches. Intercom wasn't YC backed but they actually launched a dozen times!

We might have ideas for you! Lago won't cover all these use cases today, but we're working with other players that can provide an alternative stack. If you're interested, would you mind emailing us? Founders[at]getlago.com Thanks!

haha we've been working hard to get to this point, thanks!!!

Thank you so much!

Awesome! Yes, feel free to contact us at founders[at]getlago.com if you need anything!

Honored to work with you!

I guess it was a question for telecuda, but I've worked 3y for telecommunications groups fresh out of business school and what you describe is pretty much the approach. Sometimes if it's a big group, they might have historical data and can make "informed guesses" but at the end of the day, this is it. And if the unlimited offer isn't viable (business wise), they just sunset it, and usually "grandfather" the offer.

Definitely! Also we posted at 6AM PT time and are really jet lagged, and I think Raffi had not had coffee yet!

We 100% agree with you. Actually the first tagline of Lago was "billing for product led SaaS", the wording was a bit confusing, but our thoughts were:

(i) "pure usage based pricing" models (like Snowflake's) aren't going to be the main standard for SaaS, for the reasons you mentioned, the main being predictability (for the merchant and the end-user). Cash collection is also a big pain: if you collect cash after the consumption, the dispute rate can be high. (ii) However pricings will increasingly incorporate "usage dimensions" (monthly active rows, number of emails, GB used, etc) and this trend is spreading very fast (3 out of 5 SaaS according to the latest OpenView report). It can take many forms: Annual subscriptions including a monthly base usage and/or prepaid credits based on consumption, and/or an amount of payments processed, etc This is what we lived at Qonto.com and solved for, for 4 years, and you woudn't think of it at a "usage based player" though, we rather had "usage subscriptions" : https://qonto.com/fr/pricing All the possible combinations make the billing very hard to maintain and iterate on, and this is why we built Lago. All this to say, we 100% agree with you that not all companies should choose a "full usage based pricing" but find a balance or at least iterate between "subscriptions/fixed amount" and "usage based".

Sure! My email: anhtho[at]getlago.com

What would be the use case for you and the reasons to leave Stripe Connect? We're working with one company to replace their Stripe Connect stack, but it really depends on the specifics of the use case. My email if useful: anhtho[at]getlago.com

This is definitely something we'd like to build in the future. For now, we focused on building the core billing features and giving access to the billing and usage data so that end users could leverage it in their own BI and data stack (tracking, revenue recognition, etc). The next step would definitely be to offer these kind of features: either through partnerships or internally with the help of the community. If someone is building a great product in this space, we're very interested!

That's one of the reasons why we decided not to build "entitlements" ourselves, and prefer to partner with other "pure players" (or recommend to build internally if it's really specific). We've been working with Osohq.com (open source as well) as there's a great product and DNA fit: https://doc.getlago.com/docs/integrations/entitlements/oso