# Source: https://getlago.com/docs/faq/about-software.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 the software

## 1. How popular is the software?

Lago has thousands of users, thousands of stars on Github and great investors.
Lago is the most popular open-source repository solving for billing on Github, to give you a point of reference, the second most popular one was started ten years ago, Lago caught up fast!
It has been chosen by companies like:

* [Mistral.ai](http://Mistral.ai) – the open source genAI model provider, which raised more than \$600M with top VC ([see here](https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/11/paris-based-ai-startup-mistral-ai-raises-640-million/?guccounter=1)).
* [Groq](https://groq.com/) – the startup building AI-chip for fast inference, which raised more than \$640M from top VC ([see here](https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/05/ai-chip-startup-groq-lands-640m-to-challenge-nvidia/))
* [Juni](https://www.juni.co/) – the fintech company that develops a banking app for e-commerce.
* [Swan](https://swan.io) – the leading European Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS), backed by Accel and Creandum.

and many more.
To hear firsthand experiences from our users, explore Lago's  [customer stories](https://www.getlago.com/customers/stories) and our [love wall](https://shoutout.io/lago).

## 2. Is the software updated regularly?

We release new versions every 2-3 weeks, our team is working relentlessly to improve the product.
Sign up to our newsletter, or follow us on [Linkedin](https://fr.linkedin.com/company/getlago) or [X](https://twitter.com/getlago?lang=en) (fka Twitter).
Our past product updates are [here](https://www.getlago.com/resources/updates).

## 3. How secure is Lago?

Keeping your data secure is critical to how Lago operates. Lago is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant. SOC 2 compliance ensures the secure storage and transmission of data. Type 2 compliance tests the design and effectiveness of the systems over a long period of time.

To protect access to and transmission of your data, Lago supports Single Sign-On (SSO) and Role-based access control (RBAC). SSO allows you to centrally manage your access and RBAC policies define how users interact with Lago, giving you the chance to minimize security vulnerability.

Learn more about security at Lago [here](/guide/security/rbac).

## 4. How is this different from the other billing tools?

A lot of companies continue building billing in-house, even if it means building systems that engineers hate to build, let alone maintain.
Lago has been conceived to address complex billing use cases, with  a unique open-source approach, solving for:

* Transparency: you can inspect our code, have an overview on our pull requests, github issues, what our users say and how they use Lago.
* Control: you can opt for the convenience of Lago Cloud (our hosted solution) or choose the total control that our on-premise deployment offers: keep your data within your own system, and keep a direct access to all your usage, billing and payment data  in your own infrastructure, with the highest level of granularity.
* Extensibility and connectivity: because engineers understand our code and infrastructure better.

Lago is the only open source metering and usage-based billing solution. A lot of closed source (aka ‘SaaS’) solutions exist (e.g., Stripe Billing, Zuora) but they require you to send your data to third-parties, to blindly trust a Chargebee‘black box’ with your most critical internal system (billing / revenue). We have put together these [product comparisons](https://www.getlago.com/resources/compare/compare-home) if you want to go further.

There are multiple open source billing offerings. However, Lago is the only open source software that gives you:

1. Real-time event-based usage metering
2. Subscription billing
3. Hybrid plans, mixing subscription and consumption (e.g., a usage-based billing plan that requires a recurring minimum spend per month)
4. A full fledge API to automate ‘self-serve/product-led’ plans, and an intuitive no-code user interface to configure ‘custom/enterprise’ plans
5. Additional features including: instant charges, modular couponing, spending minimums, grace periods, etc

## 5. I have a home-made billing infrastructure. How is Lago useful?

Billing is indeed much harder and costly for engineers than it might initially seem.

When getting started, it seems pretty straightforward – you decide on a price, and customers pay you. But as your business grows, things get trickier. It's like managing a puzzle where the pieces keep changing. You have to deal with dates, handle plan upgrades, track usage, avoid charging twice, remind customers to pay, and navigate the tax maze (we have written some posts on this topic [here](https://www.getlago.com/blog/why-billing-systems-are-a-nightmare-for-engineers) and [here](https://www.getlago.com/blog/the-4-biggest-problems-with-homemade-billing-systems)).

Lago is an open source metering and billing API tailored for usage-based pricing. Our API and architecture are open, so you can embed, fork and customize them as much as your pricing and internal processes require.

If you are interested, you can [get started here](https://www.getlago.com/get-started) or [book a demo](https://getlago.com/book-a-demo).

## 6. Can Lago handle high volume processing?

Lago is designed for usage-based billing and high-volume data processing. Its engine is able to handle hundreds of thousands events per second, whether they come in the form of logs or back-end events. Our infrastructure is made to scale to billions of events per month if needed. For more details, we have written about our infrastructure [here](https://github.com/getlago/lago/wiki/Using-Clickhouse-to-scale-an-events-engine).

## 7. I’m an AI company. How is Lago helpful?

Engineering teams in AI companies should be 100% focused on monetizing, not getting bogged down by [billing nightmares](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31424450).

That's where Lago, with its open-source metering and billing engine, comes in. Lago has already been chosen by leading AI companies such as [Mistral](https://mistral.ai/fr/), [Groq.com](http://Groq.com), or [Cerebrium](https://www.cerebrium.ai/), for instance.

Lago’s infrastructure handles hundreds of thousands events per second and makes it easy to offer market-practices pricing features like per-token pricing, prepaid credits, real-time consumption monitoring and progressive billing.

Use one of our templates to replicate the pricing of [OpenAI](/templates/per-token/openai) or [Mistral](/templates/per-token/mistral).