Congrats. I'm also a COSS founder and think this is a very smart step for a product like rerun. Feel free to ping me if you want to chat open-source more.
First, congrats on the launch Lago. I've been very impressed with your ability to educate devs about the intricacies of billing and you are certainly pushing the entire space forward.
While you offer coupons and credit notes, there are features you don't have that we have prioritized and built, including, usage alerts, plan versioning, gauge metrics, custom sql etc. etc. Point being I think its unfair to say we are a subset of your product.
In addition, we have a 25+ year billing expert on our team who has been CTO of a startup processing $300 million a year.
Lastly, I don't think it's fair to make statements about our customers just because we haven't "announced" them yet.
Happy to chat more with anyone about our differences.
Sorry, none of our frontend is built for or meant to be used on mobile yet, so if that was what you were planning on doing then I would agree it isn't quite there yet.
Thanks! Indeed, there are a lot of approaches to this problem. We spent some time refining Lotus so that we focus on creating new solutions rather than competing with others in a similar space. Our approach is pricing&packaging that acts as a no-code app for iteration (but can be customized for new edge cases through code/open source).
> Is it because I'm thinking about pricing for my own product or is there some powerful "why now" that I'm missing?
So many valid answers, but the major ones are the rising popularity of usage-based and hybrid pricing models and more importantly a shift in SaaS from growth = "acquisition" to growth = profitability and expansion in addition to acquisition. The economic shifts are forcing companies to ask how can we capture more of the value that we have created, and a great solution is reconsidering pricing.
I see one key difference in that we are focusing on pricing+packaging as a combined problem. We include the ability to add feature entitlements and usage limits in your plans and then programmatically check whether a customer has access to something based on the plan they are currently on. This augments your existing authorization system. It is a different approach than what Lago looks like they are going for and they don't support this now.
We also operate under an MIT license vs AGPL it looks like. So our business models may differ in the future. Looks like they definitely have some features we don't cover yet as well. Seems like a great project!
Definitely think Lotus might be useful to you, especially since you can self-host. Just took a quick look into your repo, but will do a deeper dive a bit later.
The nice thing is that we've built Lotus so that you can plug in the components you want, for example, you could plug in your custom metering into our pricing/plan management system.
We are still pretty early so we have had the ability to help migrate custom systems over to Lotus and figure out the most cost-effective solution. Will follow up on email!
Not quite. Lotus doesn't facilitate payments. Our job ends after we calculate the invoice a customer owes. We integrate with Stripe (working on Bill.com integration) so you can change customers through their payment gateway.
Lotus offers metering, a simpler frontend to iterate on plans, pricing experiments, and actual feature entitlements in our plans so that both the price and the features in a plan live in the same place. Stripe doesn't offer these components.