Lago Embedded: White-label, open-source billing

The closer your product category is to billing, the more likely you've come to the dangerous conclusion that you should offer billing. This conclusion is dangerous because building billing is a nightmare. I don't just say this because we sell a billing system. I say it because companies from very different verticals come to us saying some variation of the following:

"We want to offer billing as a feature to our customers and have spent the past few months building in-house with a few engineers full-time. But we're not happy with it and it's consuming too many resources."

Whether it's a payment provider who wants to offer an adjacent service or a vibe-coding platform that wants to enable their users to bill for the products they're building, it's always the same story:

A company wants to put billing into their product and realizes it's far too complex, even with multiple full-time engineers.

Before AI, billing wasn't as big of a problem because everything was a simple subscription. But now, billing is a growing category—and platforms want in. That's why we're launching Lago Embedded today.

Introducing Lago Embedded

Lago Embedded is a fully white-labelled billing system that supports anything Lago supports, meaning a full invoicing engine, scalable metering and native support for almost any pricing model (including credits, subscriptions, usage-based and any hybrid between them).

This means you can offer it to your customers in any way you want, without any Lago branding. Instead of taking years to have billing as a feature, you can ship it in a few weeks or months. This is why PayPal chose Lago Embedded: To use fewer internal resources to ship a great billing product faster.

Lago is uniquely positioned for this because we're open-source (with over 9000 GitHub stars). This has three main advantages:

• You can host on any infrastructure, whether that be your own AWS/GCP/Azure instance, your own servers or anything else you choose. This means no customer data can ever leak because there are no API dependencies.
• You can customize Lago to work with your product, build custom integrations and choose what (not) to offer your customers, what presets you want to offer, etc.
• There's no vendor lock-in. Even if Lago the company were to disappear, your embedded instance would stay alive.

This makes Lago Embedded unique in the market. Proprietary vendors can't offer an embedded product because they're not used to giving their entire source code to customers. We're open-source and know how to deal with self-hosted instances, ship updates and help customers maintain them.

Why use Lago Embedded?

The more parts of the value chain you offer in your product, the stickier your product will be.

This is why platforms like AWS are so dominant and can charge a premium: There's an AWS product for almost every piece of technical infrastructure you could need at any stage of your business.

This makes it hard to exit AWS: A sudden switch to a bunch of isolated vendors would fragment your operations, break integrations and make it harder to operate. This is especially severe when your customers rely on your business being available all the time (like a billing system).

But AWS had to build all of the 240ish services it offers. But most companies don't have Amazon's near-unlimited cash reserves.

In other industries, building a full-fledged billing system (especially one that supports advanced use cases like AI pricing models) becomes incredibly complex. Most teams either give up or use something like Lago Embedded.

Who's Lago Embedded for?

There are two core reasons you might want an embedded billing system.

The first is any company where billing is an adjacent feature to their functionality. This includes legacy billing (that doesn't offer usage-based), payment providers, ERPs and fintech more generally.

You can imagine payment providers bundling the metering and calculation of charges to build a more complete finance stack. Similarly, ERPs might want to perform the billing calculations, pricing, plans and billable metrics to offer a single cockpit to their customers.

The second is any company whose users want to monetize what they make. This could include vibe-coding platforms, backend-as-a-service companies and anywhere else a user might want to monetize their creations.

As an example, someone building a SaaS business on Lovable might want to monetize their users with something more complex than a Stripe subscription, especially when they're paying for AI tokens. Lago Embedded would make this easy as users could automatically create tiers, plans, credits and more.

Wrapping up: Billing is everywhere

More companies than ever want (or need) to offer billing. Lago Embedded lets any company offer billing as part of their product or as a capability to their users' creations.

If you want to try it out, find out more about Lago Embedded here or book a demo directly.