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Open-source metered billing API for usage-based pricing
Lago is an open-source metered billing platform built specifically for companies implementing usage-based pricing models — a billing approach increasingly common in infrastructure, AI, API, and data services where charging per transaction, API call, seat, or consumption unit better aligns revenue with customer value delivered. The open-source model allows companies to self-host Lago's entire billing infrastructure at zero licensing cost, retaining full control over customer billing data and system behavior — a significant advantage for companies with data sovereignty requirements or billing complexity that demands custom modification. Lago's core primitives — billable metrics, charges, plans, and subscriptions — are designed to model virtually any usage-based pricing structure: prepaid credits, real-time events, threshold billing, minimum commitments, and hybrid usage-plus-subscription models. The metering engine processes high-frequency usage events via API, aggregating them into billable charges according to configurable rules. Invoice generation, payment collection through Stripe and Adyen, and dunning automation complete the billing workflow. The cloud-hosted version provides managed infrastructure with monitoring, scaling, and support. The Lago team actively contributes to the open-source community with detailed documentation, example configurations, and a developer-focused Discord. For engineering teams building billing infrastructure for usage-based products who want to avoid the vendor lock-in and cost scaling issues of proprietary platforms, Lago's open-source model provides a compelling foundation that can be extended and customized without licensing constraints.