problems with billing for developers<\/a>.<\/p>\nIt had a catchy title: \u201cBilling systems are a nightmare for engineers,\u201d and it was written with the kind of freedom you might only be able to capture as a creator when you are really writing form the heart. That was because it was something he and Chuong knew well, since their time at Qonto was spent building a product to address that very issue.<\/p>\n
Chuong said this was really not the point. The impetus for posting on this was to pick something they knew well so that they could monitor engagement and possibly use that to pivot attention to Lago, the \u201cZapier for marketing teams.\u201d<\/p>\n
But the post struck a nerve, and to their surprise a lot of people began to speak up about their own billing issues. Lago had its \u201ca-ha\u201d moment: if what they really wanted to do was build something to solve a problem for developers, here was a problem they actually could solve, and they knew they could do it well. Cue the pivot to billing and the startup taking off.<\/p>\n
Taking off not just with users, but also investors.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe first spotted Lago via HackerNews in early 2023: they had so much traction, for a seemingly solved or trivial topic, that it seemed obvious people had been waiting for an open-source solution like theirs. We then reached out to their stargazers on Github and the feedback was nothing but stellar,\u201d said Oana Olteanu, a partner at SignalFire, in a statement.<\/p>\n
If you think marketing is a competitive market, billing is more crowded than Billingsgate Fish Market on a Friday morning. Larger tech companies like Stripe, Adyen, Salesforce, Zoho, Paddle, and many more offer billing solutions. There are even a number of providers already pursuing an open-source approach, including FossBilling, ChargeBee, Kill Bill, AppDirect\u2019s jBilling and the imaginatively named \u201cOpen Source Billing.\u201d (Why beat around the bush?)<\/p>\n
Chuong believes that there is still very much an opportunity, however, for a focus on extensibility and tailored solutions for startups trying to push the boundaries in their own competitive spaces.<\/p>\n
The AI sector is a strong example of that, in her view. Companies building AI-based products are still working out what the viable business models will be, and in the meantime we are seeing a lot of examples of companies considering hybrid approaches, mixing elements of flat-rate subscriptions with consumption-based pricing. All of this is tricky to manage and relies on tools that can integrate with whatever developers are building, with the ability to discern and apply their usage data.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you have very simple pricing and billing, there are a lot of those solutions around for that, but for complex billing, there has been no solution,\u201d she said. That leads to many companies (as Qonto did) building their own solutions. \u201cBut engineers hate it. And it\u2019s very expensive to hire engineers for that, obviously. So it\u2019s an it\u2019s still an unsolved problem.\u201d In Lago\u2019s view, offering open source tools is that best solution to meet a variety of needs and ideas.<\/p>\n
For some of those users, the open source ethos also lines up with what they are hoping to espouse themselves as businesses.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe chose Lago as our billing provider because we believe in the open-source ecosystem,\u201d Timoth\u00e9e Lacroix, co-founder and CTO at Mistral.ai, said in a statement. \u201cThey have been able to follow the pace of our releases and have allowed us to focus on what we do best.\u201d Yes, some will argue that open source might be getting stretched a lot as a concept right now, and may well be exactly the opposite of what many so-called open source companies are building. At its heart, the focus for Lago is on keeping its<\/p>\n
The company\u2019s aim is to continue building out its existing business but also to start considering what more it might add next. One obvious area is to dip back into Lago\u2019s original thoughts about marketing, and to provide more data analytics to customers about what people are consuming and paying for, and the patterns of their payments. Another is to explore the other side of the billing coin: payments.<\/p>\n
Lago is unlikely to build a payments stack, however, she added: the focus is almost certainly going to be on payments orchestration, giving users control over what they use but make sure that it integrates well with their billing platform (one that is, ideally, going to be covered by Lago of course).<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
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Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A startup out of Paris that began life building marketing tools has raised $22 million after making a successful pivot into billing \u2014 a space it discovered was even more broken among potential customers. Lago, developer of an open-source billing platform, has picked up the funding across two rounds of funding it\u2019s revealing to coincide […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":82707,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-82706","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tech"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82706"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82706\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/82707"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}