Lago vs Togai: Which Usage-Based Billing Platform Fits Your Stack?

Togai and Lago solve the same starting problem: turning raw product usage into metered, billable events. If you're comparing them, the short answer is that Togai is a managed, API-first metering and billing platform built for teams that want the rating logic handled for them, while Lago is open-source infrastructure you can run in your own cloud, extend in your own codebase, and never get locked out of. The right pick depends on how much control over your data, your rating logic, and your deployment you actually need to keep.

What Togai does well

Togai deserves credit for building a genuinely complete metering and rating pipeline. Its seven modules (ingestion, metering, price configurations, entitlements, rules and rating, integrations, insights) cover the full path from a raw event to an invoice line, and the rules engine lets teams write custom JavaScript rating logic without waiting on an engineering sprint. Togai also ships a generous free Starter plan with no credit card required, and its 30-plus pre-built connectors span CRM, payments, ERP, and cloud marketplace billing, which shortens the first integration for teams that just want metering live quickly. For a company that wants a fully managed black box and is comfortable handing over its usage data and rating logic to a third party's SaaS, Togai is a credible option.

Where the two platforms actually diverge

The real difference isn't feature count, it's who owns the system once it's running.

Togai is closed-source and cloud-only. Every event you send, every pricing rule you write, and every invoice you generate lives inside Togai's infrastructure, under Togai's terms, on Togai's release schedule. If Togai changes its platform-fee pricing, gets acquired, or simply doesn't move fast enough on a feature you need, you're stuck negotiating from the outside.

Lago is AGPLv3-licensed and built to be read, forked, and self-hosted. You can run the exact same billing engine that powers Lago Cloud inside your own infrastructure, inspect the rating logic in the source, and extend it with your own code when a pricing model doesn't fit the standard primitives. For teams in fintech, healthcare, or any regulated industry where usage and financial data can't leave a controlled environment, that's not a nice-to-have, it's the deciding factor.

Lago vs Togai at a glance

Pricing: platform fees vs a transparent core

Togai's Enterprise tier charges a platform fee tied to two variables you don't fully control: how many events you send and how much invoice value you generate. That means your billing bill grows with your own growth, on a curve set by Togai. Lago's open-source core has no such fee: it's free to self-host indefinitely, and Lago Premium (cloud or self-hosted) is priced per deal rather than as a tax on your usage volume. If usage-based pricing is central to your product, paying a usage-based fee just to run your billing platform is worth scrutinizing closely before you sign.

Data residency and compliance

Because Togai is cloud-only, there's no path to keeping usage and billing data inside your own VPC. For most SaaS companies that's a non-issue. For companies selling into finance, healthcare, or government, or companies that have already committed to a specific cloud region for compliance reasons, it can be a blocker that only surfaces during a security review, well after the integration work is done. Lago's self-hosted deployment exists specifically for this case: same product, same API, running inside infrastructure you control end to end.

Extensibility when the standard model doesn't fit

Togai's rules engine covers a wide range of pricing logic through configuration and custom JavaScript. Lago takes a different approach: because the core is open source, when a pricing model genuinely doesn't fit the standard primitives, you're not limited to what the vendor's rules engine exposes. You can read the billing engine's source, fork it, and ship the change yourself, on your own timeline, without waiting on a vendor roadmap.

Which one should you pick?

If your priority is getting a metering and billing pipeline live fast, you're comfortable with your usage data living in a third-party's cloud, and you don't expect to need deployment flexibility later, Togai is a reasonable, well-built option. If you need to keep billing data in your own infrastructure, want a payment-agnostic setup that doesn't tie you to specific processors, or want the option to inspect and extend the billing logic yourself as your pricing model gets more complex, Lago is built for exactly that.

Teams that have already run this comparison against other usage-based billing vendors have gone through similar tradeoffs. See how the same open-source-versus-managed-platform question plays out against Orb and against Chargebee for a broader view of the usage-based billing landscape, or start with what metered billing actually is if you're still scoping the problem before picking a vendor.

Want to see how Lago handles your specific pricing model? Book a demo or explore the open-source repo and run it yourself.