"Lago has been one of the most integral parts of our stack. It allowed us to do things we wouldn't have built ourselves."
Justin Rhee
Founder, Porter
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: 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.
Focus on building, not billing
Whether you choose premium or host the open-source version, you'll never worry about billing again.
Lago Premium
The optimal solution for teams with control and flexibility.
Lago Open Source
The optimal solution for small projects.
