Honest teardowns of billing infrastructure: Stripe Billing, Lago, Metronome, Orb, Chargebee, Zuora, and more.
Recurly has been quietly powering subscription management since 2009. Not the flashiest, but operationally solid where it counts: dunning, payment recovery, and multi-gateway flexibility.
Paddle is the Merchant of Record that handles global tax compliance so you don't have to. Here's what that's worth, what it costs, and who should actually use it.
Maxio (SaaSOptics + Chargify) combines subscription analytics and billing for mid-market SaaS. The merger left some seams, but the integrated financial reporting is genuinely useful.
Zuora went private after losing 85% of its IPO value. It still powers billing for hundreds of large enterprises. Here's why — and when it's still the right call.
Chargebee has been a fixture in SaaS billing since 2011. Mature, battle-tested, and genuinely good at subscription lifecycle management — if that's what you actually need.
Orb's differentiator: pricing as declarative data, not hardcoded logic. If you change prices more than once a year, the engineering overhead savings alone justify the platform fee.
Metronome powers billing for Databricks and OpenAI. Stripe paid ~$1B for it in 2025. Here's what it does that Stripe Billing couldn't, and whether you need it.
Lago is the MIT-licensed alternative to Stripe Billing and Chargebee. Self-host it for free, or pay for managed cloud. Here's when the tradeoff makes sense.
Stripe Billing is where most SaaS companies start. Fastest time-to-live, great DX, 0.5% of revenue. Here's where it hits walls and when to consider alternatives.
Stripe Billing for simplicity and fast integration. Lago if you want open-source and self-hosted. Recurly if dunning and payment recovery matter most. The "best" depends on your pricing model — if you need real-time metering and usage-based rating, start with Metronome or Orb instead.
Metronome is purpose-built for usage-based billing with real-time metering, complex rating, and enterprise-grade event processing. Stripe Billing is a subscription-first platform that added metered billing. Metronome handles what Stripe can't at scale — Databricks and OpenAI both outgrew Stripe Billing and moved to Metronome.
Lago is the leading open-source billing platform (MIT license). Self-host for free or use their cloud offering. It's strong on usage-based billing, supports complex pricing models, and avoids vendor lock-in. The tradeoff: less ecosystem integration and smaller community than Stripe.
Zuora went private in 2024 after losing ~85% of its IPO value. It still powers hundreds of large enterprises and has deep revenue recognition capabilities, but its complexity and cost make it best suited for $50M+ ARR companies with dedicated billing engineering teams.
Buy for the first $10M ARR unless billing IS your product. The total cost of building — engineering time, maintenance, edge cases, compliance — almost always exceeds licensing a platform. Build only when your pricing model is genuinely novel and no platform supports it, or when you've outgrown every vendor.