Stripe has several products, its main product is a payment gateway called Stripe Payments, with which Lago is integrated. Lago is an open-source alternative to Stripe Billing, focused on usage-based pricing. We'll compare both products here.

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Let’s take a look at each category.

Pricing

Lago is open-source and free, and we’re not fans of the ‘rent-seeker’ pricing approach.

Stripe Billing will cost you 0.5% of your transaction volume, on top of Stripe Payments (starts at 2.9% + 30¢ per successful card charge).

Lago is open-source and forever free, and we don’t like the ‘rent-seeker’ pricing approach.

Focus

Lago is focusing all its energy on billing. We aim at integrating well with adjacent tooling (payments, ERP etc.), but we strongly believe that billing deserves a standalone focus.

Stripe is a Payment Processing service at its core. They developed many ancillary products as it grew: tax, treasury, and billing, for instance.

Purchasing process

Lago and Stripe Billing are both self-serve. However, Stripe is known to have negotiable fees if you're patient enough to schedule several calls with their Sales team.

We advocate for a more transparent and straightforward purchasing process.

Compatibility

Lago can be used with any payment platform: Stripe, Paypal, Mollie, Adyen, etc. This gives you autonomy, freedom and flexibility in the design of your stack.

Stripe Billing can only be used with one payment platform: Stripe Payments. If you want to use another payment processor, you’ll have to use another billing vendor as well. Accepting PayPal payments is impossible for instance.

Vendor lock-in

There is no lock-in in the sense of 'annual contract' with Lago or Stripe Billing. However, Stripe Billing forces you to only use Stripe Payments as payment gateway.

Customization

Lago has been built with an event-based architecture, to be as flexible as possible. In any case, you can also fork our code and use it to build your very own system. You can adapt Lago to your billing model.

Stripe Billing has been built with a specific attention to B2C subscription pricing, and e-commerce billing. It makes it less relevant for more complex pricing models, typically in B2B, for consumption-based pricing (pay-as-you-go) and the hybrids (subscription and consumption pricing models).

API

Both Stripe Billing and Lago have an API-first approach.