AnhTho_FR

Thanks for your trust, it means a lot to us!

Thanks!!!

That's on point. A "proprietary billing service", or a service that includes billing in the value proposition in general: whether you're a vertical SaaS, an accountingtech, or a payment processor.

The short answer is "no". The high-level concept of AGPLv3 is to prevent someone who'd like to re-sell the OSS company's features (billing in our case). For instance, let's say you're a vertical SaaS like Mindbody, selling software to yoga studio owners so that they manage their business: scheduling, payment, and billing. If you use Lago to build your own billing feature (and sell it as part of your product), you'd need to either buy a commercial license (we call it "Lago Embedded") from us OR open source your code. Let me know if you need more clarifications!

Amazing to read, I was excited to see this 2 days ago, thanks for your trust!

(Lago co-founder here) Thanks for your message Louis, we always welcome genuine and actionable feedback and appreciate the time you invested into writing an example!

Thanks Arnon! I often keep sharing your blog post on entitlements: https://arnon.dk/why-you-should-separate-your-billing-from-e... !

It's amazing to see the landscape of open-source internal tool maturing, this release of tooljet look great. There are also other tools like windmill.dev that support complex workflows and serverless endpoints, and budibase that focus on no-code administration panel. The future is open-source!

Loans = 0 dilution, indeed

I like https://o-p-e-n.com/: breathing, meditation, physical exercise But mainly it's been about paying attention to what gave me energy vs was draining, etc.

I took an 18-month break and I felt directionless too. I started with my bucket list: travels, writing classes, sports, organizing parties / trips with friends. But at some point, it felt a bit "vain"and my friends didn't have the same schedule. After this I decided to work part time on a contractor basis, and this definitely improved my level of happiness: having enough constraints to appreciate my free time more, having more people around me, being stimulated!

I love Giverny, go every year. It's only one hour from Paris, and I think it's underrated by visitors, it's such an immersive artsy experience, highly recommended!

OP here, first I'd like to apologize as our point has never been to be manipulative, but I understand from your comment that it can be perceived that way.

I'll ask the moderator to replace the link.

For the sake of sharing our thought process, not to justify ourselves:

a/ About Github links, we thought we'd start segmenting content to different audiences: via Github and via our website. Our company has several audiences (founders, engineers, product managers, finance and revenue people) and we've been willing to create interesting content for each of them. It's still in the works (as you can see, there are fewer articles on Github vs on our website, some content is duplicated, which is actually bad for our own SEO, it's far from being a very polished strategy). In no case, did we think people would think "because it's posted via github, the content would be perceived to have more authority", or "because it's a github link, with such a title, people would expect a repo". I understand it's what happened, though, hence the apologies.

b/ We did post several times. We read from [1] that is was ok to do so, and we've also seen that amazing posts which interested the community sometimes were not visible on the first attempt (example [2]). I'm fully aware from the comments that it wasn't something we should have done, I just want to share our thought process.

c/ We did invest a lot of time writing in my company, and I genuinely love writing.

I spend a lot of time thinking about what would be useful and impactful to the tech community in general. Sometimes it voluntarily points out to Lago, sometimes it's indirect, sometimes it has no link to Lago (examples 3 or 4), but I just think it might help or resonate with people. Once again, HN is a community, so I just want to abide by the rules.I thought we did. We have not been shadow banned or contacted by the mods. From the comments I understand it has been perceived as "too much" at times. I just wanted to say I genuinely do love writing and sharing, it's a mean for me to connect with people, and hopefully help a tiny bit if people resonate with it. So I'm grateful because HN has helped us connect with people who resonated with our content, and I apologize for the rest.

Will email the mods about the link just after hitting "reply"!

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24170546 2: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... 3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33882590 4: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33641019

Thanks! Not sure about the exact questions but I think we could have dug deeper into what the persona (growth team) was ready to invest or learn to be autonomous with their data needs. And if they had shown a history of « learning curve », so that we could have made sure it wasn’t just « wishful thinking ».

You mean writing this using ChatGPT instead of « handwriting » it?

Do you think you’re like « born with the pre existing ur free » or it can be learnt and/or depends on context?

Thanks Henry!

Love the 2-way sync. Genuine question: why would we use Bracket vs Airbyte (ETL + Reverse ETL) ?

I like this one with a focus on OSS: https://oss-startup-podcast.launchnotes.io/

Also the point of my initial comment was that even if you consider this post optimised for vitality, pointing that we are optimising on only that in our content seemed a bit extreme, hence the examples.

The point was showing how the pricing and costs adds up.

A lot of founders don’t get what products they use at Stripe and that the cost adds up as a % of revenue.

% of revenue makes sense for payment processing, does it really make sense for SaaS products (billing, tax?) ? What’s the rationale?

About offering alternatives for fintech software (such as billing, tax), with a pricing that does not take a cut on revenue, this is exactly what we are building.

Thanks

Hi Sam,

OP here. I appreciate the inputs, we're big fans of Stripe at Lago. We operate in the billing space, and are alternatives to home-grown billing systems, Chargebee, Recurly, etc. and Stripe Billing.

1/ Some users use Lago as a complement of Stripe Billing, or don't even consider Stripe Billing, and we built a native integration with Stripe payments.

Out of transparency, the first lines we wrote in this post stated that: "Disclaimer: This analysis is based on Stripe’s public pricing as of July 21, 2022. Some merchants may be able to negotiate fees or benefit from grandfathered plans. Lago partners with 'Stripe Payments' and can be used as a complement or replacement of 'Stripe Billing'."

2/ > 'write deliberately-provocative posts to go viral'

Thanks for quoting my tweet. I actually shared 2 old articles I wrote in 2021 this week, that made the front page of HN, unrelated to Fintech:

- One on my personal blog sharing what I learnt about press relations, main message being 'don't waste money on an agency if you're early stage' because I've seen this happen too often, and too many founders asked me the same questions about this topic [1] I was actually surprised it was read, as HN is known for being more 'engineering oriented' than 'marketing oriented'. - Another one about 'scouts' not being necessarily a good thing for founders, with Sifted (TC for EU) which is a position I stand for as a founder and as an investor, and I think Europe should mature towards this topic [2]

The TLDR is: I've been writing about a wide range of topics for a long time, things I like to share, things I stand for and want to have an impact on and was grateful it resonated within my community. Btw I think the HN ring vote is pretty strong, and HN community very 'fierce' (at times), so I don't think we could have got attention by just 'clickbaiting' and attempting to go viral.

Like any startup, we're excited to share our vision of the world, and this is why we're writing.

Lastly, here are two other examples of content that were intended to spark a discussion in our community (and it did) and don't bring much to Lago as a business:

a/ What not to say to someone who has just been laid off [3] I wrote it after my partner was laid off and too many people around him just did not know what to say, which amplified the 'grief'. It reminded me of my personal history of grief, and wrote the post. I received dozens of messages of people who have been laid off recently, or whose friend/closed ones had been fired. Founders reached out to say they would share it with their team (it's not an easy topic to discuss).

b/ I recently shared my thought process about moving to the US after YC, as it's a recurring question we have as YC founders based in Europe. This sparked a lot of discussions and helped me iterate on how I approach the question, in a scalable way. I believe other founders learned things by the discussion it sparked, some founders reached out to help me with the US visa etc. Feel free to read it here [4]. Took me some time to write it, but the main ROI was how I've been able to connect with other founders, at the same stage, or 5 steps ahead, and learn from them. And, based on the comments/discussions, I believe other founders in the same situation benefited from this too.

My point is: not all content is written in an attempt to go viral, but I just write about what I believe brings value, and it happens to go viral (whatever you mean by that) when it does have an impact. Regarding my tweet, I think a lot of people wonder how to approach HN, and make a lot of rookie mistakes, and I could also write about what I've learned. This would (if I write it successfully) in fine help having better content on HN.

YC says 'build something people want', I also happen to (occasionally) write things people want. And there's no better gift for a writer.

[1] https://anhtho.substack.com/p/pr-for-startups-is-it-only-for... [2] https://sifted.eu/articles/vc-scout-programme-problems/ [3] https://sifted.eu/articles/what-not-to-say-layoff/ [4] https://github.com/getlago/lago/wiki/Moving-to-the-US-after-...

Haha EU isn't perfect, but from a super high-level and personal point of view (and there are millions of nuances within Europe), but generally there's more emphasis on the common good as a society, than what I've seen in the US

(I grew up in France but part of my family lives in the US).

Thanks a lot! I've just fixed it, it was supposed to redirect to https://www.getlago.com/about-us

Probably yes! Will think about this structure for next title, thanks for the feedback!

I think what Merek meant is:

A workaround to Stripe fees for FX card payments would be to have a set of Wise accounts to receive the money in the local currency (one account or wallet for each currency) but then you'd still need to pay Wise conversion fees, once you want to gather the money from the different wallets into a master account

From my understanding, they are not. They provide payment cards but don't process payment by cards.

Got it! Will iterate on the article based on your inputs, thanks for the constructive feedback!

Hi dkyc, OP here. Sorry to read this was your impression, two points:

1/ To prevent such a feeling, we've included this disclaimer at the beginning of the post, (i) to state where we stand vs Stripe, (ii) the source data is Stripe's pricing, happy to share more details about the hypothesis

"Disclaimer: This analysis is based on Stripe’s public pricing as of July 21, 2022. Some merchants may be able to negotiate fees or benefit from grandfathered plans. Lago partners with 'Stripe Payments' and can be used as a complement or replacement of 'Stripe Billing'."

2/ I think below comments (to be clear: comments from people completely unrelated to Lago) show how you can reach 4 to 8%. It's also one of the reasons why 'Paddle' is an attractive solution in Europe, it's an all-in-one solution that takes 5-6% on revenue and provides subscription management, payments, invoicing, tax management.

Let us know if you need more info, or if you have feedback on what we could have done differently. In any case, I genuinely appreciate that you took the time to comment!