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Why PayPal uses Lago for complex billing at enterprise scale

When PayPal wanted to offer billing to merchants on its platform, they didn’t want to build complex billing from scratch and maintain it forever. That’s why they picked Lago. In PayPal’s integrated finance ecosystem, billing was the missing piece. Why It Matters If you're evaluating billing infrastructure in a regulated industry like financial services, PayPal's decision reveals something important: the market has changed. First, complex billing is becoming more important: AI is increasing

Anh-Tho Chuong

Anh-Tho Chuong•2 min read

Why PayPal uses Lago for complex billing at enterprise scale

Customers

Insights from our customers on how they use Lago to power their billing.

700+ customers in year one: How Blacksmith built scalable usage-based billing for CI/CD with Lago

Customer Stories

700+ customers in year one: How Blacksmith built scalable usage-based billing for CI/CD with Lago

Anh-Tho Chuong

Anh-Tho Chuong•2 min read

Customer Stories

Why PayPal uses Lago for complex billing at enterprise scale

When PayPal wanted to offer billing to merchants on its platform, they didn’t want to build complex billing from scratch and maintain it forever. That’s why they picked Lago. In PayPal’s integrated finance ecosystem, billing was the missing piece. Why It Matters If you're evaluating billing infrastructure in a regulated industry like financial services, PayPal's decision reveals something important: the market has changed. First, complex billing is becoming more important: AI is increasing

Anh-Tho Chuong

Anh-Tho Chuong•2 min read

Customer Stories

How 1NCE scaled global IoT billing with Lago

Introduction 1NCE disrupted the IoT connectivity industry in 2018 with a bold offer: 10 years of global software and connectivity for €10. The model was simple, affordable, and perfectly suited to low-data use cases like smart metering, asset tracking, and street lighting. But as the IoT market evolved, so did customer needs. Many use cases demanded higher data volumes and faster speeds. In response, 1NCE launched High Data IoT: a pay-as-you-go model offering 5€/GB with speeds up to 25 Mb/s. T

Anh-Tho Chuong

Anh-Tho Chuong•2 min read

Customer Stories

How Flipside Crypto Built Usage-Based Billing for Blockchain Data

Flipside Crypto charges for API access and Snowflake integration on a usage basis. No prior billing system. Here's how they went from zero to production with Lago.

Anh-Tho Chuong

Anh-Tho Chuong•2 min read

Lago

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Engineering

How to build billing systems that don't become engineering nightmares.

Agent SDK: bill the dollar cost of LLM calls, margin built in

AI

Agent SDK: bill the dollar cost of LLM calls, margin built in

Anh-Tho Chuong

Anh-Tho Chuong•Jul 21•1 min read

AI

We killed our motion design job

We never hired a motion designer. Now we never will. Every major Lago feature now ships with a launch film. A coding agent produces it through a skill we wrote. The skill creates three artifacts: a storyboard, an animatic, and the final film. A human approves the first two. The expensive render only starts after both gates pass. Six videos in, feedback dropped from a dozen rounds to about one. The marginal cost is now one prompt, two approvals, and thirty minutes of unattended rendering. We t

Anh-Tho Chuong

Anh-Tho Chuong•Jul 21•5 min read

Engineering

Removing humans from the loop has become a status symbol.

The pitch: ticket in, code out, revenue up, headcount flat. Then someone, usually someone who manages billions, fresh from shipping a vibe-coded to-do list, asks why everyone cannot do the same. Billing moves money and trust. Healthcare, insurance, security, logistics and infrastructure also change states other people rely on. These companies are not less AI-native. Their workflows are less forgiving. The right mental model is not how far an agent can go. It is where it should stop. 1. The

Raffi Sarkissian

Raffi Sarkissian•Jul 20•4 min read

Engineering

REST API Design Guide for Billing: Best Practices 2026

Building a robust REST API for billing systems requires careful attention to endpoint patterns, authentication mechanisms, error handling strategies, and API versioning approaches. According to recent API governance research, 68% of API failures in production stem from inadequate design decisions made during the architectural phase rather than implementation bugs [1]. This guide explores proven best practices for designing billing REST APIs that scale reliably, maintain backward compatibility, a

Anh-Tho Chuong

Anh-Tho Chuong•Mar 30•16 min read

New resource hub

Introducing Lago Learn.

The billing decisions most teams get wrong, and how to get them right. Playbooks for engineering and finance.

Explore the full library of playbooks

Playbook

How to design usage-based pricing models

Whitepaper

The rise of the finance systems engineer

Guide

Self-hosted vs cloud billing, the complete guide

Product

How we think about building billing infrastructure.

Orb Is Being Acquired by Adyen. Here's What That Means If You're Evaluating Usage-Based Billing Platforms.

Product

Orb Is Being Acquired by Adyen. Here's What That Means If You're Evaluating Usage-Based Billing Platforms.

Anh-Tho Chuong

Anh-Tho Chuong•Jun 29•8 min read

Product

Chargebee Alternative? Why Engineering-Led Teams Choose Lago for Usage-Based Billing

Chargebee alternative? Compare Lago vs Chargebee on self-hosting, PSP neutrality, and AI/usage billing, plus when Chargebee is still the right call.

Anh-Tho Chuong

Anh-Tho Chuong•Jun 26•7 min read

Product

AI Billing is (mostly) token plumbing

Why we built the Lago Agent SDK, and what we're shipping next. We just released the Lago Agent SDK. Two libraries, Python and TypeScript. They wrap your LLM client and send token usage to Lago for billing. That's the surface. The point is what you stop doing. The token plumbing Every team that shipped an AI feature in the last 18 months built the same thing. Smart search, inbox triage, meeting summaries, coding agents, vibe-coded apps. All of them ended up writing token-extraction middlewar

Raffi Sarkissian

Raffi Sarkissian•May 26•5 min read

Product

Embedded software is the biggest growth opportunity for open source

When you link your bank account to Venmo, you're not using Venmo's technology, you're using Plaid. An Uber sends you a ride notification, that originates with Twilio. Maps in Strava, Doordash or Instacart? Powered by Mapbox. These are some of the most successful software companies ever built, and most of their end users have never heard of them. They don't compete for the spotlight — they disappear inside other people's products. In hardware, this model already has a famous name: TSMC. The Tai

Anh-Tho Chuong

Anh-Tho Chuong•Mar 26•5 min read

Startup Stories

Lessons from the trenches of building and scaling startups.

We killed our motion design job

AI

We killed our motion design job

Anh-Tho Chuong

Anh-Tho Chuong•Jul 21•5 min read

Startup Stories

Why Replit's $9B Valuation Looks Cheap

Bias check: I'm a YC founder myself, and I have a soft spot for pivot stories. We use Replit at Lago and love it. Lago is a billing infrastructure company, so yes, I spend too much time thinking about how platforms monetize. A $9B valuation on ~$240M in revenue implies a ~37x multiple. Not cheap by traditional SaaS standards. The bet investors are making is that Replit becomes something bigger than a SaaS company. The plateau years Replit was founded in 2016. A REPL (Read-Eval-Print Loop)

Anh-Tho Chuong

Anh-Tho Chuong•Mar 24•6 min read

Startup Stories

Vibe-coding platforms monetize. Their users can't.

Lovable crossed $200M ARR in under a year. Replit charges up to $200/month per seat. Base44 got acquired by Wix for $80M. These platforms know how to monetize. Their users don't. The Shopify lesson The obvious pushback: who cares? Most vibe-coded apps are toys. Mostly true. But in 2025, merchant solutions made up over 75% of Shopify's total revenue. Merchant solutions = payment processing, capital lending, shipping. Everything Shopify earns when merchants transact through the platform. Not

Anh-Tho Chuong

Anh-Tho Chuong•Mar 11•4 min read

Startup Stories

5 years of founder grind

Disclaimer: People gave me “AI slop” comments on my latest article. I’m writing this post without AI, together with my co-founder Raffi and our content lead Finn who helped me edit it (“by hand”). A lot of founders ask me whether they should apply to YC, open-source their product or move to SF. I get it, but I think we’re missing the real depth here.  There’s pressure to work 996 (9am-9pm, 6 days a week), to be on top of the latest AI thing, to live in the right place, to “get it right”, accor

Anh-Tho Chuong

Anh-Tho Chuong•Feb 20•9 min read

Latest articles

The most recent insights from the Lago team.

By 2027, every AI company will need a billing engineer. Most don't know it yet.

Jul 29, 2026

Why Stripe may pay $10B for a router everyone is building

Jul 27, 2026

AI API Billing: Token-Based Pricing for LLM Products

Jul 24, 2026

Lago vs Orb: Open-Source Billing vs a Billing Specialist Now Inside Adyen

Jul 21, 2026

Removing humans from the loop has become a status symbol.

Jul 20, 2026

Enterprise SaaS Billing: What You Actually Need (2026)

Jul 6, 2026

Pricing and Billing Glossary (2026)

Jul 1, 2026

Orb Is Being Acquired by Adyen. Here's What That Means If You're Evaluating Usage-Based Billing Platforms.

Jun 29, 2026

Chargebee Alternative? Why Engineering-Led Teams Choose Lago for Usage-Based Billing

Jun 26, 2026

B2B SaaS Subscription Management: Best Practices and Strategies

Jun 23, 2026

The AI margin cliff

Jun 19, 2026

7 AI Pricing Models: What Works, What Breaks

Jun 1, 2026

AI Billing is (mostly) token plumbing

May 26, 2026

Dunning, Prepayment, and Spend Caps: How to Stop Unpaid AI Bills

May 1, 2026

700+ customers in year one: How Blacksmith built scalable usage-based billing for CI/CD with Lago

Apr 6, 2026

Lago solves complex billing.

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