---
title: "How Porter scaled self-serve billing with Lago"
url: https://getlago.com/blog/porter-billing
description: "Introduction Before using Lago, Porter was a sales-led company that mostly relied on manual enterprise agreements. But when they wanted to offer usage-based self-serve pricing, they needed a more robust billing system that wouldn't become an engineering headache, but supported enough advanced features. I sat down with Porter's founder Justin Rhee and engineer Mauricio Araujo to talk about their journey with Lago. Here's what I found out: Challenges Before adopting Lago, Porter used Stripe f"
authors: ["Anh-Tho Chuong"]
tags: ["Customer Stories"]
published: 2025-11-13
updated: 2026-07-20
reading_time_minutes: 2
---

# How Porter scaled self-serve billing with Lago

### Introduction

Before using Lago, Porter was a sales-led company that mostly relied on manual enterprise agreements. But when they wanted to offer usage-based self-serve pricing, they needed a more robust billing system that wouldn't become an engineering headache, but supported enough advanced features.

I sat down with Porter's founder Justin Rhee and engineer Mauricio Araujo to talk about their journey with Lago. Here's what I found out:

### Challenges

Before adopting Lago, Porter used Stripe for subscriptions and handled most things manually. But when the Porter team wanted to cater to startups, they needed to offer a self-serve option.

Porter is a platform as a service, meaning they provide infrastructure, hosting and other services for developers inside cloud services. In these categories, most products are priced based on usage, not subscriptions.

Building a usage-based billing system in-house was not an option. From the beginning, Porter knew they wanted to buy a billing solution to not divert engineering resources from the product.

### Why Porter chose Lago

Porter evaluated a few different vendors, but ultimately chose Lago for a few main reasons.

• Automated invoice management: Because Lago handles metering, billing and invoice management, Porter reduced the manual work for the engineering team.

• Webhook automation: Simplifies outreach to customers in case of payment failures.

• Flexible pricing and customization: Allowed Porter to have multiple pricing models and customize them for each customer without creating manual labor.

• [Credit system](https://getlago.com/blog/usage-based-pricing-examples): Building credit systems is tricky and complex, but Porter could use Lago's credit system out of the box.

• Support responsiveness: For products that need customization, you always need support. Porter told me they loved the support they got from us (with a special shoutout to Mathieu!)

### How Porter uses Lago

Implementing Lago improved multiple areas of Porter's business. Most importantly, Porter was able to focus their engineering resources on building their core product, not on maintaining a billing system. Lago's credit system and trial period features enabled Porter to offer targeted startup deals, like exclusive offers for YC companies.

Because of Lago's interface, non-technical team members can now also adjust subscriptions, extend trials, and apply discounts without needing eng. Finally, Lago API integrations created more revenue visibility simplified tracking financial performance and usage-based metrics.