from Hacker News

Lago, Open-Source Stripe Alternative, banks $22M in funding

by Rafsark on 4/7/24, 2:19 AM with 120 comments

• by plantain on 4/7/24, 7:10 AM

  I tried to use it for a new SaaS product - but their plans start at 3000$/mo.

  It seems like they have things backwards. The small fry like me don't want to self-host, we want a managed solution. The big fishes have enough scale to self-host.

• by darylteo on 4/7/24, 5:49 AM

  Selling to developers is where i know it will struggle... Developers are cheap ass and would rather build it themselves at 10x the opportunity cost. And the moment it attempts to monetise itself in some form, there'll be a massive "betrayal" exodus a la Redis.

  I know, cuz I am one.

• by ku1ik on 4/7/24, 7:49 AM

  Maybe I’m old and my feeling for what open-source means haven’t adapted to the changing reality, but whenever I see “open-source” and “$22 in funding” in one sentence I immediately think “open-source my ass”.

• by mvkel on 4/7/24, 4:09 AM

  If I still have to pay the processing fees, what's the advantage here?

  Having to maintain my own payments stack (and PCI compliance) sounds like a massive distraction.

• by giorgioz on 4/7/24, 7:38 AM

  Similarly there is https://hyperswitch.io open source written in Rust.

  Lago is written in Ruby.

  I found few other open source billing systems written in Java.

  Anyone knows anything written in nodeJS?

• by globalise83 on 4/7/24, 7:29 AM

  Paris seems to be absolutely on fire when it comes to producing new fintech startups.

• by abledon on 4/7/24, 4:09 AM

  Their github README uses a Drake meme lol

  https://github.com/getlago/lago

  https://imgur.com/a/gsrhUXm

  I'd never thought I'd see Meme-ification of technical docs.... oh god

• by djbusby on 4/7/24, 1:32 PM

  Anyone have an actual Stripe Payments alternative? I'm stuck on PayPal since Stripe doesn't want to work with us, only with our closed source competition.

• by jbverschoor on 4/7/24, 1:10 PM

  It’s not a stripe alternative.

  Billing, invoicing, payments, entitlements, subscriptions.

  All different things.

• by mooreds on 4/7/24, 4:11 AM

  Raised series A of 15M on a valuation (rumored, not announced) of 100M.

  7M was seed, raised in 2023 according to crunch base.

  Sounds like they aren't trying to be an entire stripe replacement (from the last paragraph of the linked article).

  Anyway an interesting story of a successful startup pivot starring a passionate HN post.

• by mib32 on 4/7/24, 1:28 PM

  Can you please explain, why the ruby engineer vacancy is remote only within certain countries - FR, PT, GB, NL, ET, and IT? Why if I live in Latvia or Poland, or Sweden, I can't work with you? I don't want to call you out, but it's just interesting to understand why it's like that and specifically, why we can't try to make the geography more diverse, at least within EU?

  https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/lago/jobs/RvvzKuM-sr-b...

• by baxtr on 4/7/24, 6:13 AM

  This is the HN post (mentioned in the article) that resulted in their pivot from marketing into billing:

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31424450

• by wslh on 4/7/24, 11:53 AM

  ELI5: what is the value proposition for Lago? That is open-source?

  I am not a Stripe customer but I interacted with it as a normal user (e.g. KYC) and was impressed by their UX/UI, an area where open source projects doesn't excel at all. UX/UI is really hard to grasp.

  Stripe customers look for a strong finance platform, they don't care if it's open source or not. Also, from the business perspective you need to have a hard drive to manage a company like this.

• by cheema33 on 4/7/24, 3:27 PM

  Looks very interesting. We are small shop and self-hosting is not an issue. This neatly fits a requirement we've had for quite some time.

• by w-ll on 4/7/24, 3:42 AM

  whats the motive?

• by azophy_2 on 4/7/24, 7:36 AM

  have anyone using this encounter any legal issues, as this project use AGPL?

• by szundi on 4/7/24, 5:27 PM

  Aaaaand it’s gone.