# Source: https://getlago.com/docs/faq/about-lago.md

> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://getlago.com/docs/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# About Lago

## 1. What is Lago?

[Lago](https://www.getlago.com/) is the leading open-source pricing solution focused on complex billing: multi-product/geographies, transactional, usage-based, subscription hybrids, etc, chosen by unicorns like Mistral (AI, \$13.7 billion valuation), Accel-backed Swan (Embedded banking), or Groq (AI, \$6.9 billion valuation).

Lago is API-first, the most loved billing solution on Github, and was voted Product of the day week, and month on Product Hunt.

Lago raised a total of [\$22M of funding](https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/14/lago-a-paris-based-open-source-billing-platform-banks-22m/) from investors including Y Combinator, FirstMark Capital, SignalFire, [Meghan Gill](https://www.linkedin.com/in/meghanpgill/), who has led the monetization efforts of MongoDB for 14 years, [Romain Huet](https://www.linkedin.com/in/romainhuet/), former head of Developer Relations at Stripe - now leading OpenAI developer experience, and [Clément Delangue](https://www.linkedin.com/in/clementdelangue/), CEO of AI open platform Hugging Face.

<iframe src="https://ghbtns.com/github-btn.html?user=getlago&repo=lago&type=star&count=true&size=large" frameborder="0" scrolling="0" width="150" height="30" title="GitHub" />

## 2. What does Lago do?

Lago helps businesses calculate how much their end-users need to pay, and make sure they’re paid.
This includes, but is not limited to:

* Managing subscriptions
* Metering consumption, or usage (e.g., for a telco provider: the number of minutes of a call ; for an electricity provider: the number of kwH used)
* Generating and sending invoices
* Triggering and tracking payments
* Managing customers’ accounts

**Features overview:**

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="Real-time usage metering" href="https://www.getlago.com/products/metering">
    Lago’s event-based architecture provides a solid foundation for building a
    fair pricing model that scales with your business.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Flexible plan configuration" href="https://www.getlago.com/products/plans">
    Lago supports all pricing models. Create pay-as-you-go and hybrid plans in
    no time with our intuitive user interface or API.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Coupons and discounts" href="https://www.getlago.com/products/coupons">
    Create engaging marketing campaigns and increase conversion with coupons
    that customers can redeem to get a discount.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Coupons and discounts" href="https://www.getlago.com/products/coupons">
    Create engaging marketing campaigns and increase conversion with coupons
    that customers can redeem to get a discount.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Add-ons and one-off invoices" href="https://www.getlago.com/products/add-on">
    Lago allows you to create one-time charges that are invoiced on the fly.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Invoices generation" href="https://www.getlago.com/products/invoicing">
    Depending on the configuration of your plans, Lago automatically calculates
    what each customer owes you and generates invoices.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Prepaid credits" href="https://www.getlago.com/products/prepaid-credits">
    Unlock recurring revenue opportunities for pay-as-you-go pricing models with
    Lago’s prepaid credit features.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Integrations" href="https://www.getlago.com/integrations">
    Lago Billing takes integration to the next level, seamlessly integrating
    with every aspect of your business operations.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Instant charges" href="https://www.getlago.com/premium-features/instant-charges">
    Charge customers instantly while retaining the freedom to choose whether or
    not to generate an invoice for the transaction.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Customer portal" href="https://www.getlago.com/premium-features/customer-portal">
    Effortlessly integrate the customer portal into your application, providing
    your customers with seamless access to detailed usage information and
    invoice data.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Spending minimums" href="https://www.getlago.com/premium-features/spending-minimum">
    Take control of your billing process by establishing minimum spending limits
    for charges. With our platform, you can easily define the minimum amount
    customers must meet for a usage-based component.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Email invoices" href="https://www.getlago.com/premium-features/email-invoices">
    Providing a seamless integration of email communication with the billing
    engine, allowing businesses to send professional invoices directly to their
    customers' inbox.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Grace periods" href="https://www.getlago.com/premium-features/grace-periods">
    Have the flexibility to make adjustments to customers' usage, even after the
    billing cycle has ended. Fine-tune and modify usage details, ensuring that
    you have complete control over your invoicing.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Billing timezones" href="https://www.getlago.com/premium-features/timezones">
    Simplify international billing. Bill your customers according to their
    respective timezones.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Credit notes and refunds" href="https://www.getlago.com/premium-features/credit-notes-refunds">
    Unlock customer satisfaction with credit notes issuance and customer
    refunds. Streamline your operations and foster trust by handling credit
    notes and refunds through our UI and API.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>

Check our documentation [here](https://docs.getlago.com/guide/introduction/welcome-to-lago), for more information.
Reproduce Notion, Slack, or Stripe’s pricing in a few clicks with our templates [here](https://www.getlago.com/resources/templates/all).

## 3. What is Lago origin story?

Lago was founded in 2021 by Anh-Tho and Raffi, who were among the earliest employees at Qonto.com – a \$5B B2B neobank. They led Qonto's revenue growth from pre-product to Series D, and built and scaled the monetization system that took the company from 0 to \$100M+ of revenue.
A fun fact was that when Raffi pitched the idea of Lago to Romain (a senior billing engineer at Qonto), he told him “no way”, and said he did want to quit his position at Qonto but he would “NEVER touch a billing system again”.
Step by step, Raffi managed to convince him he could channel this energy and experience to make sure fewer engineers would need to relive the billing nightmares he had to endure. And it worked!

At Qonto, they would always underestimate the engineering nightmare billing would create, and learned the hard way about the side effects: delayed launches at best, billing errors, resulting in churning users, and a growing “billing engineering” team that not only was expensive, but very hard to retain. The worst was that at some point, the “pricing strategy” nearly switched to “what’s the easiest option to implement”, rather than “what’s the best for the company”.
Raffi and Anh-Tho, and the founding Lago team then spent a lot of time carefully analyzing why no one had solved this huge problem yet, as they thought solid companies like Stripe or Chargebee had partially addressed it.

That’s how they built our conviction on the open-source and “platform” approach of Lago, to not be another “buy billing” option, but rather a “Lego '' that engineers build with to create their tailored monetization stack.

## 4. Does it work with my stack?

Yes. Lago is agnostic and can be used via:

* Our no-code interface, see it in action [here](https://youtu.be/dXnoMRetsr4)
* Our [API](https://doc.getlago.com/api-reference/intro)
* Our native integrations: Segment, Hightouch, Stripe Payments, Adyen, Salesforce, and many others, [here](https://www.getlago.com/integrations)
* One of our [backend libraries](https://doc.getlago.com/api-reference/intro) covering the main programming languages and tools
  You can use Lago with your stack, whatever it is.

## 5. Is this supported properly?

Lago is a well funded project with thousands of stars on [Github](https://github.com/getlago/lago), in [very active development](https://github.com/getlago/lago-api/graphs/commit-activity), by our [core team](https://www.getlago.com/about-us) and our active community.

Additionally, we have strong uptime performance ([99,99%+ uptime](https://status.getlago.com/uptime/klj713fz3fcy)) and \<10 min median response time across support channels.