Lago is now in Beta
Published January 25th, 2023
What we shipped since June 2022
Credits to Posthog, an incredible open source company, for the inspiration regarding the timeline!
Our Alpha in numbers
1,800+
Github Stars
Took 6 months to catch up to where Kill Bill was 6 years after they opened their repo (the incumbent open-source billing repository).
3,400+
Downloads
Number of downloads from our self-hosted versions. This represents the number of Docker pulls from the Docker Hub. Developers love Lago!
224K+
Billed customers created
Number of customers created in Lago that are billed on a recurring basis. Those users received hundred of thousands of billing events.
108K+
Lines of code
Representing both Frontend (React), Backend (Ruby) and all the created SDK clients that are making the implementation easier.
Why we chose to start with an “Alpha α” Program
Most companies don’t label their first releases as “beta”, let alone “alpha”. The reasons are obvious: if you optimize for immediate “user acquisition”, skipping the “alpha” and “beta” steps is a no-brainer. We’re not like this.
We’ve built from scratch and scaled the billing system of a unicorn before, and we can relate to the pressure related to building and scaling billing. Long story short: it’s a high pressure, complex, lonely, and yet low recognition job. Most people usually think billing is a trivial process (they think the hard work is strategizing about pricing on a spreadsheet) and have a “just do it” attitude.
We optimize on building trust in the long term: our code is inspectable, our roadmap is open, and when we don’t have a precise answer yet, we try to share our thought process as much as possible.
Skipping the “alpha” before having users in production, in a period when breaking changes were a possibility, or before having “must-have” features like “credit notes” wasn’t an option. We just wanted to be fully transparent, and attract users with an early adopter mindset, rather than attracting masses of users for vanity metrics.
Our mental framework was “if we manage to have respectable companies use us in production, when we haven’t reached feature parity and are still labeled alpha, this means we hit a nerve”...
... and we did.
What's new with the Beta
The Beta comes with a bunch of incredible news.
1. Features
We committed to graduate from the “alpha” only when our product has a set of foundational billing features. Said differently, the “no brainer billing must-haves” needed to be shipped first. And here they are:
Credit notes
Issue a credit note to refund or credit back a customer's account. This is the easiest and smoothest way to deal with refunds or adjust an invoice that is already emitted, without infuriating accountants.
Grace periods
Use Grace Periods to gain flexibility when invoicing and perform consumption adjustments. Invoice grace periods are a window of time between the end of a billing period and the “finalization” of an invoice.
Timezones
Bill your customers in their timezone, not yours! By billing your customers based on their timezone, you make sure that billing information is simple for them to understand and…to agree with.
Invoices list
View all your issued invoices and track payment statuses. If you spot an unpaid invoice, you request the payment one more time, directly from the User Interface or using the API.
2. Reliability
Lago has been tested and bulletproofed by hundreds of companies, for hundreds of thousands customers all over the world. Billing is core to your business, so we make sure it's always up and running.
We're launching status.getlago.com to keep track of uptime across all of our services and critical infrastructure.
3. Funding
Some companies announce their funding round as soon as the money hits their bank account. We’re not like this. Funding is a means to an end, not the opposite.
When we were not heads down building, we chose to communicate about our product and the vision for our space, rather than funding.
If you're wondering though, we've been backed by top institutional investors and individuals who built category defining businesses before, in Fintech, Developer Tooling, Open Source, and B2B SaaS.
We'll make a proper announcement in the coming months.
Here are some of the companies our investors actively shaped and set for success:
We will never forget our early supporters: thanks!
