AnhTho_FR

Thanks for sharing the thought process!

I have gathered related articles here as well! https://github.com/anhtho-lago/awesome-opensource-company

Are Stripe costs eating 8% of your revenue?

Maybe.

Stripe's pricing is transparent, what's confusing is which combination of products you're using. They have 21 now.

We crunched their total fees in this article.

PS: we love Stripe Payments API, and integrated with them. We were confused ourselves and shared our internal analysis.

Open Source Collection of insights that can help building a Company around an Open Source project, from Hugging Face, dbt, Supabase, Airbyte, Cal.com etc.

In France and in most countries in EU, it's mandatory to have a PDF that follows very pecific guidelines. Can't say for sure for every country though!

Lago founder here. FWIW we love what Baptiste did with Microinvoice!

I can only speak for what we've experienced first hand, in our prev. company (a $5B B2B fintech) we spent a lot of time around billing x invoicing in pdf :

- When billing is complex (lots of fees, different billing cycles, usage based consumption) - And you need to have a clear "invoice presentation" to avoid triggering questions (that is maintained while you iterate on pricing, launch new products or countries) the "template isn't really a solved problem", and our eng. team did rebuild the system in-house. We would have avoided it if it could have been possible and looked at every possible option, in-depth.

We've seen similar needs for marketplaces or vertical saas as well.

However thanks for the feedback, we could have done a better job at explaining why it can be a pain in specific use cases! And I was the 1st person to say, when I first discover the painpoint "there must be an existing solution for that, please don't build anything in-house".

Thank you so much for the definition, to clarify: as the API is already open source, see above comments, I was asking what else was requested / missing.

It's AGPLv3 licensed indeed!

Yep I should have added it as well in my prev answer, and doing it for a reasonable cost at scale is not trivial!

What do you mean by "backend" ?

You're right, per se generating a small number of PDF is indeed easy.

What's complex is: - Dynamic PDFs: you're trying to digitize a government process for instance, by launching online forms with a variety of user paths for the answers and generating a PDF with the answers that still fits specific government requirements - Doing it at scale

Congrats on the round! the way you iterated / pivoted is an example of resilience for a lot of founders!

Love it! Shared it with my husband!

Generating a custom PDF is just such a pain. You don't know it before you tried to do it.

I've seen Anvil (a YC co) is building a product dedicated to this challenge, check it out!

Interesting, what did you use instead? How was the experience transitioning?

In France we would call it a "mille feuilles" (a thousand leaves?), like the pastry!

It's the best for payment, but the additional fees come on top of the payment fees, for SaaS products: billing, data sync, etc.

Up to 6-7% in some cases! Not saying it's not worth it, but it's worth knowing beforehand.

I would not say it's hidden, everything is public, but honestly even I wasn't 200% sure about which product we used / were charged for before writing this post!

Thanks for posting! We spent quite some time peeling the onion to understand how much Stripe actually cost indeed, so decided to share it!

Will we soon receive "memos" saying we should have 40 months of runway even at pre-seed/seed?

As founders we've been flooded with a lot of advice but not a lot of tactics so far. Not useful.

There are 3 impactful topics that are undercovered IMHO:

1/ How should we manage user acquisition budget? It can still be a great channel, and the costs will potentially go down, so it's not black or white. We should think twice before cutting off this budget entirely.

2/ How should we iterate on pricing? Raise prices? Introduce paying plans? Usage-based pricing? It's a delicate question, and would appreciate nuanced inputs.

3/ How about cash management?

Not black or white: raise more, lay off 20% of your workforce. It might be necessary, be there are other ways to increase working capital.

Would love to amplify, reshare if you built actual frameworks / insights around it.

It's definitely tougher. Seed investors expect a business plan on the next 18 months, so imagine the low level of uncertainty / ambiguity they are ready to deal with...

Thanks!!! It's crazy but I can think of dozens of US companies that successfully pivoted, but not a single one of them is European!

Awesome deep dive!

Hello! As promised, the repo is available here: https://github.com/getlago/lago ! We also opened our roadmap: https://github.com/getlago/lago/projects/2 You can request and vote for features here: https://community.getlago.com/c/feature-requests/11

As promised, the repo is available here: https://github.com/getlago/lago !

Public roadmap: https://github.com/getlago/lago/projects/2

Request features here: https://community.getlago.com/c/feature-requests/11

We also have a fully hosted version if anyone is interested. Looking forward to receiving your feedback!

Raffi and I are building www.getlago.com : the open-source Stripe Billing alternative

Was I really such a pain? :)

We have an event-based architecture and offer 'aggregations' at the moment: https://doc.getlago.com/docs/guide/billable-metrics/aggregat... We plan to add more aggregation types, gauge metering as well!

We definitely want to address usage-based pricings, but also all the pricings that are hybrid between usage and subscriptions (ie the vast majority of software pricings). Feel free to reach out if you have more question: anhtho@getlago.com

I am Anh-Tho blabla... just kidding :)

We're working on making the quoting process simpler indeed. What we've learnt that the only companies that can afford a proper quoting system are enterprises: they implement Salesforce CPQ (configure price quote) or Zuora. They are mostly sales-driven, so the investment is worth it.

But it does not make sense for PLG companies, who start with self-serve and layer sales afterwards: the investment is not worth it, and it creates 2 different systems: self-serve and sales-driven billings, not great for the user experience (and for the internal processes!)