Lago, best Metronome alternative for usage-based billing

What is Metronome?

Metronome is a usage-based billing platform that helps software companies launch, iterate, and scale their business models. Metronome offers a wide range of features, including real-time usage metering and billing, flexible pricing models, integrations with popular accounting and CRM systems, and detailed reporting and analytics.

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What is Lago?

Lago is an open-source metering and usage-based billing solution. It offers a self-hosted and cloud-based, scalable, and modular architecture to manage subscriptions, usage based billing and all the nuances in between. It's the go-to choice for companies that require a powerful tool to handle complex billing logics, allowing you to build a comprehensive billing system from scratch with ease.

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How is Lago different from Metronome?

1. Feature comparison

Invoicing

Metronome does not include built-in invoicing features, requiring integration with third-party providers such as Stripe, AWS Marketplace, and NetSuite. This can lead to additional costs.

Lago provides invoicing that works out-of-the-box. This means that businesses using Lago can create invoices, send them via email, and access invoice data through API.‍

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Taxation

Metronome enables tax calculation through Stripe’s system. This can help you with tax compliance but also lead to additional costs.

Lago provides a built-in tax system that enables you to set up taxes at different levels and automatically assign them to charges, plans and customers.

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Time Zones

In the context of global product development and billing, navigating time zones can be a challenging aspect. Your timezone may not match your customer's. This could lead to discrepancies in usage ingestion, subscriptions, and invoicing, which may not occur on the date you anticipated. If your customer does not understand what they are billed for, it erodes trust and will incur “billing disputes”.

Metronome does not offer specific features to address different time zones.

With Lago, usage ingestion, expiry dates and billing can be triggered based on the timezone of your customer.

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Payment gateways

Metronome only supports Stripe as its payment processor. This means that businesses using Metronome are limited to using Stripe to collect payments. While Stripe is a widely-used payment processor, Stripe may not support every product and may not be available in all countries. Notably, in countries such as India, Stripe Payments is not widely adopted.

Lago is agnostic and enables you to connect with any payment providers. In addition, Lago is already natively integrated with several payment providers (see here).

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2. Is Lago cheaper than Metronome?

Metronome does not offer a free trial. Based on our internal research in Q3/2023, Metronome requires businesses with up to $1.5 million in annual revenue to commit to a minimum annual platform fee of $10,000. This plan provides limited support. Higher-tier plans come with custom pricing.

Lago offers a forever-free Open Source solution for small businesses, allowing access to core billing features. Besides, Lago provides Startup and Enterprise Plans with access to premium features listed here.

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3. Transparency matters

Transparency is one of the 8 things to consider when choosing your billing system.  When choosing a third-party billing solution, it's essential to ensure your team understands its architecture. This knowledge is invaluable, especially for tricky scenarios. You want to avoid being in the dark when trying to resolve critical issues.

If you opt for a closed-source solution like Metronome, push for transparency and try to understand how it works.

Lago, being an Open Source, offers complete transparency, allowing engineers to audit its code and even build on top of it. And the best part is, it’s always free and accessible. So, Lago serves as a fall back option without vendor lock-in concerns. What’s the fallback option for a tool like Metronome? The pertinent question arises: what if Metronome discontinues its product or enforces a significant price hike?

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TL;DR: Table of comparison Lago vs. Metronome

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Is Lago an Open Source alternative for Metronome?

Yes! Lago is an open-source and open-core Metronome alternative. Lago’s GitHub repository is open to everyone, running under an AGPL v3 license.

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Does Lago provide a user interface similar to Metronome's?

Yes! In addition to being API-first, Lago provides a user-friendly interface that can be used by non-technical people.