Stigg vs BuildBase for usage-based billing
Stigg goes deep on entitlements, credits and usage enforcement. BuildBase bundles metering into a whole backend. Which one you need depends on what else is missing.
In short
Stigg is a dedicated entitlement, credits and metering layer that sits alongside your existing billing, auth and database. BuildBase includes metering, quotas and subscriptions inside a backend that also does auth, workspaces and RBAC. Stigg goes deeper on entitlements; BuildBase means fewer systems to wire together.
Every usage-based billing comparison eventually reaches the same question: is pricing a product in your stack, or a feature of something bigger?
Stigg's answer is that it is a product. Ours is that it is a feature. So does a third: Lago answers it by being nothing but metering, deeper than either of us on that one axis and narrower everywhere else. All three answers are defensible and they suit different teams.
The one-paragraph answer
Pick Stigg if pricing itself is the thing you iterate on: multiple packages, frequent packaging changes, entitlements that need to be modelled precisely, and an existing stack you are happy with. Pick BuildBase if metering is one of several systems you still have to build, and you would rather have quotas that already know what a workspace and a role are.
What each one is
Stigg is a usage and entitlement layer. It holds the model of what each customer, user or AI agent is allowed to do, meters what they actually use, and enforces both through their SDK, with credits and wallets on top. You keep Stripe, your auth and your database exactly as they are.
It used to be fair to describe Stigg as entitlements sitting on top of someone else's metering. That is no longer true. They ingest and aggregate usage events themselves now, so the overlap with our metering module is direct rather than adjacent.
BuildBase includes metering inside its credits module, one of 20 modules on a single instance. Usage is recorded against a workspace, the quota is checked in the same call, and the subscription that defines the quota lives in the same system as the workspace and its members.
The practical difference shows up in the wiring. In Stigg's model, a quota check has to know which customer this request belongs to, which means your auth system and Stigg agree on an identifier and you maintain that agreement. In ours, the workspace is already the unit.
Pricing, verified 23 September 2026
Stigg bills on two meters. The first is managed entities: any customer, user, agent or team that Stigg makes an enforcement decision for. The second is usage events, the raw metering volume.
Build is free with 10,000 managed entities and 5 million usage events a month. Pro is $399 a month billed annually, or $499 month to month, with the same 10,000 entities and 25 million events included and graduated pricing above both. Scale is custom. BYOC, which runs Stigg in your own VPC with no event billing, is custom too, from $40,000 a year.
Our side comes out of the repo rather than off a web page. Launch is $49 a month, Grow $99, Scale $199. There is no free plan. The trial runs 7 days and does not ask for a card, which is the half people drop when they read "no free tier" and stop reading. Current figures live at /pricing.
| Feature | BuildBase | Stigg |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | No free plan, 7-day trial | Build: 10K entities, 5M events/mo |
| Entry paid plan | $49/mo (Launch) | Pro: $399/mo annual, $499 monthly |
| Billing unit | A plan, not per event | Managed entities plus usage events |
| Self-hosted option | Yes, see /self-hosted | BYOC from $40K/yr |
| Scope | Metering inside a backend | Entitlements, credits and metering |
The row that matters is the billing unit, not the entry price. Stigg's bill
tracks two things you do not fully control: how many entities it enforces for
and how many events you send it. Ours is a plan. We meter usage, which is what
bb.usage.record does, but what you pay for does not move with your event
volume. Storage is the only quota that bills over, at $0.10 per GB. Which of
those you want depends on whether your own revenue moves with usage too.
The integration question
Here is the part that decides it for most teams, and it is not about features.
A dedicated entitlement layer is one more system that needs to agree with your auth about who the customer is, with your database about what a workspace is, and with Stripe about what was sold. Three agreements you maintain. That is completely fine when pricing is complex enough to deserve its own product, and it is overhead when it is not.
Bundled metering removes those agreements by removing the boundary. The cost is that you get our model of entitlements rather than a richer one.
Where Stigg wins
Entitlement depth. This is Stigg's whole product and it shows. Complex packaging, add-ons, credit wallets, feature-level entitlements, and a new tier or feature shipped without a deploy. If pricing is something you change every month, we do not match that and I would not pretend otherwise.
It works with what you have. Stigg does not ask you to move your auth or your database. Adopting it is additive. Adopting a bundle is a bigger decision, and reversing it is harder.
Event headroom. 5 million usage events a month on a free tier is past the point where most products know whether their pricing model works. Pro includes 25 million and graduates up to 500 million, and Stigg says usage is never cut off on either plan. That is more metering capacity than most products will need in a year.
When each one is wrong
Stigg is the wrong call if entitlements are the only sophisticated thing about your billing and you are still missing workspaces, roles and an auth system. You would be integrating a precise pricing model into a stack that does not exist yet.
BuildBase is the wrong call if your stack is already built and working. Ripping out an auth provider that works, just to get bundled metering, is a bad trade. The bundle pays off when you are choosing the pieces. Not when you are replacing them.
If you are at the earlier point, the metering side is covered in charging per API call in Next.js and the UI side in enforcing quotas in React. And if the real question is whether to skip both of us and build metering from scratch, the cost of building usage metering yourself runs the arithmetic on that third option.
And if neither entitlement depth nor bundled metering is actually the question - if what you're trying to replace is Stripe's own Billing add-on specifically - the shapes for that are sorted in Stripe Billing alternatives.