Lago pricing

About

Lago is an open-source billing and metering platform for usage-based, subscription, and hybrid pricing models. It gives engineering and finance teams the metering, invoicing, payment orchestration, entitlements, and revenue-analytics primitives needed to bill any metric — tokens, GPUs, API calls, seats, credits — without building a billing system from scratch. The product ships in two forms: a free, self-hosted Community edition (open source under AGPLv3, deployed via Docker) and a managed Lago Cloud offering sold through sales conversations.

Founded by CEO Anh-Tho Chuong and CTO/CPO Raffi Sarkissian, Lago is a Y Combinator (S21) company that has raised roughly $22M total — a $7M seed led by SignalFire and a $15M Series A led by FirstMark Capital, announced 2024-03-14 at a reported ~$100M valuation. The company positions itself as the leading open-source billing platform and reports processing around $829M in invoices monthly. Its open-source repository carries roughly 9.8k GitHub stars under AGPLv3, and its customer base skews toward AI, infrastructure, and fintech — Mistral AI, Synthesia, Groq, PayPal, Swan, and Laravel are named references.

Lago competes with closed-source billing infrastructure such as Stripe Billing, Chargebee, and the newer usage-billing wave like Metronome and Orb. Its differentiator is the open-core posture: teams worried about vendor lock-in, data residency, or wanting to inspect and self-host the billing engine can run the full Community edition for free, then graduate to the managed cloud for premium support, SLAs, and a self-hosted-with-support deployment. For broader context, see how peers structure the freemium pricing trade-off and the wider pricing blueprint.

Pricing summary : free self-hosted vs quote-only managed cloud

Lago runs an open-core model with two distinct paths. The free path is the self-hosted Community edition — open source under AGPLv3, run on your own infrastructure via Docker, with no license fee. The paid path is the managed Lago Cloud, sold in two tiers — Business and Enterprise — both of which are quote-only: the pricing page publishes no dollar amounts and routes every plan to “Contact us” / book a demo. This is a deliberately gated, sales-led posture on the commercial product, contrasted against a genuinely free open-source on-ramp.

The dimensions that shape a managed Lago quote (none of them priced publicly):

• Plan tier — Business (core managed platform, business-hours support) vs Enterprise (adds 24/7 support, an assigned solutions engineer, and a self-hosted-with-support deployment option).
• Usage volume — Lago meters events and transactions; event/usage volume is the natural scaling axis for a billing platform, though Lago does not disclose its rate card.
• Paid add-ons — several capabilities are add-ons in both tiers rather than bundled: progressive billing, automatic dunning, tax integrations, and CRM/CPQ/accounting integrations.
• Deployment — Lago Cloud (managed) for Business; Lago Cloud or self-hosted-with-support for Enterprise.

What makes this different: the entire commercial catalog is quote-only — neither paid tier shows a single price — yet a fully free, fully featured-enough open-source edition undercuts the need to ever talk to sales for teams willing to self-host.

Pricing by product

Lago has one product with three ways to consume it: the free self-hosted Community edition, and two quote-only managed cloud tiers. No dollar amounts are published for the managed tiers — both display “Contact us” on the pricing page.

Lago platform (self-hosted)

Lago platform (managed cloud)

Add-ons (both managed tiers)

Sales motions across products: PLG / self-serve for the free self-hosted Community edition (download and run yourself); sales-led and quote-only for both managed Business and Enterprise tiers.

Hidden costs : what running Lago really costs beyond the quote

Because Lago publishes no managed-cloud prices, the meaningful “hidden cost” question splits two ways: what you pay if you self-host the free edition, and what sits outside the base quote if you buy the managed cloud. In both cases the sticker is misleading — “Free” is not zero, and “Contact us” is not all-inclusive.

Archetype A — the self-hoster. A team that runs the free Community edition pays nothing to Lago, but billing is operationally heavy. The real bill is infrastructure plus engineering time.

The lesson: the free edition removes license fees and lock-in, but billing is the kind of system engineers hate to own — and billing increasingly doubles as an analytics platform, where the most valuable premium features are gated out of Community, so heavy users tend to graduate to a quote anyway.

Archetype B — the managed-cloud buyer. A scaling AI company buys Lago Business, but several capabilities its finance team expects are billed as add-ons on top of the base package.

The lesson: dunning, tax, and accounting connectors are exactly the things a revenue team assumes are “in the box,” yet on Lago’s 2026 matrix they are explicitly marked Add-on in both Business and Enterprise — so the realistic bill is the base quote plus a stack of separately-priced modules.

Want to estimate your own Lago bill? Use the Lago pricing calculator to model your costs based on event volume, add-ons, and self-host vs managed deployment.

Pricing evolution : Lago pricing history and changes

Lago has never published a managed-cloud dollar figure on its pricing page — from the 2023 “Open Source / Premium” layout to the 2026 “Business / Enterprise” matrix, the paid path has always said “Contact us.” What has moved is the packaging and the naming: a 2022 open-source launch, a 2024 funding-driven feature expansion, and a late-2025 redesign that renamed the tiers and pushed several capabilities into paid add-ons.

Cadence

Tracked range: 2022-01–2026-06 (29 Wayback snapshots of getlago.com/pricing). Quarters not listed above were verified stable (0 price changes, 0 SKU additions). No public dollar amount has ever appeared for the managed product.

Notable changes

• 2022-06-02 — v0.1 open-source billing platform launches under AGPLv3; pricing page adopts the “Fair pricing for all — no revenue cut, no lock-in” Open Source (Free) + Premium (Contact us) layout.
• 2022-11-26 — The essay “Engineers’ billing nightmares” reaches 204 points / 120 comments on Hacker News, a major top-of-funnel moment that predates the product’s maturity.
• 2024-03-14 — $22M total funding announced ($15M Series A led by FirstMark, $7M seed led by SignalFire; ~$100M valuation). Pricing FAQ shifts to stage-based packages (early / scaling / enterprise).
• ~Dec 2025 — Pricing page redesigned and rebranded: Premium becomes Business and Enterprise; the free open-source edition is removed from the comparison matrix and pushed to GitHub; progressive billing, dunning, tax, CRM/CPQ, and forward-deployed engineers become add-ons in both paid tiers.

The 2025 rebrand in detail

The most consequential pricing change in Lago’s history is not a number — it is the late-2025 repackaging. For roughly three years (2022–2025) the pricing page ran a stable, ideologically clean two-column story: Open Source (Free) beside Premium (Contact us), with a feature matrix that mostly differentiated “core” from “premium” billing capabilities and a manifesto-style FAQ (“we don’t take a cut on revenue… it felt like rent-seeking”).

The Wayback snapshots bracket the change tightly: the 2025-11 snapshot still shows “Open Source / Premium,” while the 2026-01 snapshot already shows the current “Empowering sophisticated pricing models” layout with Business and Enterprise columns. Three things changed at once:

1. The free edition left the matrix. Where the OSS tier used to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with the paid tier as a first-class comparison column, it is now a “Deploy open source” link to GitHub. The headline pricing decision is now which paid tier, not free vs paid.
2. Add-ons appeared. Capabilities that buyers treat as table-stakes — progressive billing, automatic dunning, tax integrations, CRM/CPQ/accounting connectors, forward-deployed engineers — are now explicitly marked Add-on in both Business and Enterprise, unbundling revenue from the base package.
3. The platform expanded upmarket. Lago AI (on-demand AI agents / billing intelligence) and Lago Embedded (white-label billing) joined the nav, and the matrix gained enterprise signals (multi-entities, audit logs, granular RBAC, self-hosted-with-support on Enterprise).

The through-line: Lago kept its “no public price” posture intact while quietly shifting the commercial narrative from “free OSS vs paid cloud” toward “buy a paid package, then add the modules you need.”

What’s unique : open-core billing with a genuinely free on-ramp

A genuinely free, fully-functional open-source core — not a crippled trial. Lago’s Community edition is the real billing engine under AGPLv3, deployable on your own infrastructure with no license fee and no time limit. This is the opposite of a typical “free tier” that throttles you toward a credit card; it is a complete product you can fork, inspect, and self-host forever. That free path is the whole point of the freemium pricing thesis here — it removes the need to ever talk to sales for teams willing to operate billing themselves.

“No revenue cut” as a pricing manifesto. For years Lago’s pricing FAQ argued, almost ideologically, that taking a percentage of customer revenue is “rent-seeking” — fine for payment processors whose risk scales with volume, but wrong for billing software. So Lago prices on software dimensions (a fixed fee plus metered events/usage), never on a slice of GMV. That positioning is the explicit anti-Stripe-Billing, anti-Chargebee wedge.

The entire commercial catalog is quote-only. Neither Business nor Enterprise shows a dollar figure — both say “Contact us.” A billing company that itself refuses to publish prices is a striking choice, and a deliberate one: Lago sells “packages tailored to company stage” rather than a public rate card, trading self-serve transparency for sales-led customization.

Self-host with support — the lock-in escape hatch, paid. The Enterprise tier’s standout mechanic is a self-hosted deployment option with a vendor SLA and an assigned solutions engineer. That lets risk-averse or compliance-bound buyers keep billing data in their own VPC/on-prem while still buying support — a combination closed-source competitors structurally cannot offer.

Add-on unbundling on top of the quote. Since the late-2025 redesign, capabilities like progressive billing, dunning, tax, and accounting connectors are billed as add-ons rather than bundled — so two customers on the “same” tier can pay very differently depending on which modules they switch on.

Strengths & weaknesses

Billing UX : the metering, invoicing and analytics controls Lago ships

Named controls surfaced on the pricing-page feature matrix (these are the product capabilities Lago bills against, since Lago itself is the billing tool):

• Billable metrics & usage ingestion — define metered dimensions and ingest events, including premium ingestion sources, with real-time usage alerts.
• Real-time usage alerts — threshold alerts on usage as it accrues, so customers can catch overages before invoicing.
• Entitlements & plan configuration — manage entitlements directly in billing, with plan configuration and per-customer plan overrides.
• Customer portal — a hosted customer-facing portal for self-service billing visibility.
• Invoice generation, management & preview endpoint — generate and manage invoices, plus an invoice preview endpoint to render an invoice before it’s finalized.
• Credit notes & progressive billing — issue credit notes; progressive billing is available as a paid add-on.
• Cash collection — payments integration plus automatic dunning (dunning is an add-on) for hybrid billing models.
• Revenue analytics — in-product dashboards, CSV exports, and a data pipeline integration for warehouse delivery.
• API key permissions (granular) — granular, role-based API key scoping; RBAC on the platform.
• Lago AI — on-demand AI agents and AI billing-intelligence capabilities.
• Deployment & compliance — Lago Cloud or self-hosted deployment, SOC 2 Type II, flexible deployment (on-prem / VPC), and custom branding with SMTP integration.

Strategic wins : Why Lago’s pricing decisions worked

1. Open source as the top-of-funnel, not a loss leader

Lago made the free, self-hostable AGPLv3 engine the product’s front door. Combined with developer-first content (the 204-point “Engineers’ billing nightmares” HN thread predated product maturity), the open-source on-ramp built distribution and trust before any sales motion existed. For pricing teams, this is the freemium pricing flywheel done deliberately — give away the engine, monetize operation and support. See usage-based pricing fundamentals for the underlying framework.

2. “No revenue cut” turns pricing into positioning

By refusing to take a percentage of customer GMV and pricing only on software dimensions (fixed fee + metered events), Lago converted its rate model into a competitive narrative against Stripe Billing and Chargebee. The message — “billing is software and should be priced as such” — is itself the sales pitch. This is a textbook example of aligning the value metric with how buyers think about fairness, and it resonates with the broader move away from per-user licenses.

3. Self-host-with-support unlocks compliance-bound buyers

Offering a paid self-hosted Enterprise deployment with an SLA and a solutions engineer lets Lago sell to fintech, IoT/telco, and regulated buyers who cannot send billing data to a third party — exactly the customers closed-source SaaS billing structurally locks out. It monetizes the lock-in fear instead of triggering it.

4. Quote-only packaging captures complex, high-value deals

Refusing to publish prices is a real cost (it kills self-serve), but it lets Lago tailor “packages by company stage” to the messy, high-ACV billing needs of AI and infrastructure companies. For a product whose value is proportional to billing complexity, a sales conversation extracts more than a public rate card would. Related: how outcome- and usage-based models reward customized, value-aligned packaging.

Areas to improve : Gaps in Lago’s pricing approach

1. Publish at least a starting price or a public range

A billing company that won’t show any price is an ironic friction point, and it forces every evaluator into a sales call before they can budget. A concrete fix: publish a Business “starting at $X/mo” anchor or a public band by event volume, even if Enterprise stays quote-only. A single anchor would let buyers self-qualify and reduce the cost-unpredictability and bill-shock anxiety that gated pricing creates.

2. Re-surface the free edition in the comparison

The late-2025 redesign dropped the open-source tier out of the matrix, weakening Lago’s strongest differentiator — that “free” is a real, full product. The fix: restore a three-column comparison (Community · Business · Enterprise) so the genuinely-free path is visible at the decision point, not buried in a “Deploy open source” link.

3. Make the add-on boundaries explicit before the sales call

Marking dunning, tax, and CRM connectors as “Add-on” without indication of cost means buyers discover the real bill mid-negotiation. A fix: a short, public “what’s in the base package vs add-ons” explainer with at least relative pricing, so finance teams can model total cost the way they can with a transparent usage-based billing vendor — and so Lago practices the pricing transparency it sells.

Key takeaways

1. A free open-source core can be a distribution engine, not a discount. Lago gives away the full billing engine under AGPLv3 and monetizes operation, support, and premium features — the open-source product is the top of the funnel, not a watered-down trial.
2. You can make your value metric a moral argument. “No revenue cut, no lock-in” reframes a pricing choice as fairness, turning the rate model itself into the differentiator against Stripe Billing and Chargebee.
3. Gating works in both directions. Lago gates up (premium features out of free) and gates sideways (managed prices behind “Contact us”) — but a fully-free escape hatch keeps the gating from feeling coercive.
4. Repackaging is a pricing change even when no number moves. Lago never changed a public price, yet the late-2025 rename to Business/Enterprise plus add-on unbundling materially changed what buyers get for their money.
5. Selling transparency while hiding your own prices is a credibility risk. A billing platform that won’t publish a single dollar figure invites the exact “black box” criticism it levels at competitors.

UBP implications

1. Software dimensions beat revenue share for infrastructure tools. Pricing on metered events and a fixed fee — rather than a slice of customer GMV — is the credible model for usage-based infrastructure, because it grows with the customer without taxing their success.
2. Open-core is a viable UBP go-to-market when billing is operationally hard. When the product is something engineers hate to build and maintain, “free to self-host, paid to operate and support” converts complexity into a monetization surface.
3. Add-on unbundling is the next lever after the base usage metric. Once a vendor has a usage-priced base, breaking dunning, tax, and integrations into separately-priced modules lets it expand revenue per account without raising the headline rate — at the cost of budget predictability.

Sources

• Lago pricing page (accessed 2026-06-02)
• Lago book a demo (accessed 2026-06-02)
• Lago open-source repository (GitHub) (accessed 2026-06-03)
• Lago about page (accessed 2026-06-03)
• Lago documentation (accessed 2026-06-03)

Bottom line

Lago is the rare billing company that gives away its core engine and refuses to publish a managed-cloud price — an open-core, “no revenue cut” stance that turns its pricing philosophy into its marketing. The free AGPLv3 edition is a genuine product, not a trial; the paid Business and Enterprise tiers are quote-only, and since the late-2025 rebrand several expected capabilities sit outside the base package as add-ons. The model is coherent and credible, but the lack of any public anchor remains the one place Lago doesn’t practice the transparency it preaches.

Want to compare Lago against other billing and monetization infrastructure companies? Browse the pricing blueprint.

Pricing timeline : Major events on a vertical axis

Each milestone below corresponds to a public pricing change, product launch, or material adjustment. Major events use a filled marker; minor adjustments use a faded one.

Two quote-only managed tiers (Business + Enterprise) confirmed

Jun 2026

Lago's pricing page presents two managed cloud plans — Business and Enterprise — both quote-only with no public dollar amounts. Enterprise adds 24/7 support, an assigned solutions engineer, implementation check-ins, multi-entities, and a self-hosted deployment option. The free open-source self-hosted edition remains available off-domain on GitHub (AGPLv3, ~9.8k stars).

Redesign + rebrand: Business / Enterprise tiers, OSS off the matrix, paid add-ons

Dec 2025

Between the Nov 2025 and Jan 2026 snapshots Lago overhauls the pricing page ('Empowering sophisticated pricing models'). The paid path is renamed from Premium into two columns — Business and Enterprise — both quote-only ('Contact us'). The free self-hosted Community/Open-Source edition is dropped from the main matrix and pushed to GitHub. Lago AI and Lago Embedded join the platform; several capabilities become paid add-ons in both tiers: progressive billing, automatic dunning, tax integrations, CRM/CPQ/accounting integrations, and forward-deployed engineers. Verified via Wayback 2025-11 vs 2026-01 snapshots.

Premium feature matrix expands (progressive billing, dunning, SSO, marketplaces)

Feb 2025

Across 2024–2025 the Premium matrix grows: multiple billing entities, dunning & payment retries, progressive billing, custom SQL metrics, Google/Okta SSO, granular API-key management, audit logs, Anrok/Avalara tax, HubSpot/Salesforce CPQ, and AWS/GCP/Azure marketplace listings. Structure unchanged — still Open Source (Free) vs Premium (Contact us). Verified via Wayback 2024-08 and 2025-08 snapshots.

$22M total funding; pricing page adds funding banner and stage-based packages

Mar 2024

Lago announces $22M total funding ($15M Series A led by FirstMark + $7M seed led by SignalFire; ~$100M valuation). The pricing page keeps the Open Source (Free) / Premium (Contact us) two-tier display but adds a funding banner and reframes the FAQ around 'packages tailored to company stages: early, scaling, enterprise.' Source: TechCrunch (2024-03-14) and FirstMark announcement.

Open-source billing v0.1 launches — Open Source (Free) + Premium (quote-only)

Jun 2022

Lago ships v0.1 as an open-source metering and usage-based billing API under AGPLv3 on GitHub. The pricing page settles into a two-column 'Fair pricing for all' layout: Open Source (Free, 'made for small projects') and Premium (Cloud or Self-Hosted, 'On demand / Contact us'). Stated posture: no revenue cut, no lock-in, hybrid fixed-fee + usage quotes, 30-day money-back, 50–75% startup/OSS discounts. (This replaced an unrelated 2021-era data-sync product that had public $50–$1,000/mo tiers.) Verified via Wayback 2023-04 snapshot; launch corroborated by SignalFire investor post and the 204-point HN thread 'Engineers' billing nightmares' (2022-11-26).