Lago alternatives, sorted by what you are actually trying to avoid
Lago alternatives compared by what they replace: a metering engine now owned by Stripe or Adyen, a subscription specialist, or billing bundled into your own backend.
In short
Leaving Lago usually means picking a replacement: Metronome and Orb, now owned by Stripe and Adyen, for deeper usage metering; Chargebee for subscription and dunning maturity; or a bundled platform like BuildBase if billing was never the only integration you needed to replace.
Search "Lago alternatives" and the same five names come back on every list: Stripe Billing, Chargebee, Metronome, Orb, maybe Recurly. What none of those lists mention is that two of the five just changed hands. Stripe closed its purchase of Metronome in January. Adyen closed its purchase of Orb in July. If part of why you are leaving Lago is not wanting your metering engine's roadmap decided by someone else's acquisition, half of the standard answer just became exactly that.
The one-paragraph answer
If raw metering depth and event throughput is the whole problem, Metronome and Orb are still the deepest tools for it. Just know you are now evaluating a Stripe product and an Adyen subsidiary, not an independent vendor either way. If subscription maturity and dunning tooling at scale is the actual gap, Chargebee is built for that specifically. And if the real reason billing felt like a second job is that you were also going to need auth, workspaces and role permissions from somewhere else anyway, BuildBase bundles all of it into one instance, at the cost of the metering depth a specialist engine gives you.
What Lago actually is
Lago is an open-core usage-metering and billing engine. The self-hosted Community edition is free and published under AGPLv3, and it handles event ingestion and eight charge models: per-unit, graduated, package, percentage, volume, dynamic, custom and progressive. What it does not include for free is the customer portal or credit notes and refunds - those sit behind Lago Premium, and automatic dunning, tax integrations and progressive billing are add-ons on top of it. Premium is sold as managed cloud or self-hosted and priced by talking to sales rather than a public rate card. See Lago vs BuildBase if you want the full side-by-side rather than the roundup version here.
Where each alternative fits
Metronome - deep metering, now inside Stripe. Metronome built its name on orchestrating billing for complex usage models, with customers including OpenAI, Anthropic and Nvidia by Stripe's own account. Stripe completed the acquisition on 14 January 2026, reportedly near $1B, and Metronome now operates as part of Stripe rather than as a standalone company.
The metering capability has not gone anywhere. What has changed is who owns the roadmap and, eventually, how it gets bundled with Stripe's own Billing product.
Orb - deep metering, now inside Adyen. Orb's pitch was similar to Metronome's: a dedicated engine for translating complex usage contracts into invoices, used by companies like Vercel and Replit. Adyen announced the deal in June 2026 at $335 million in cash and closed it on 1 July. Orb runs today as an Adyen subsidiary under what Adyen calls an incubator model.
Pricing for both Metronome and Orb is quote-only across every tier, so there is no public number to compare here even before the acquisitions - that part has not changed.
Chargebee - subscription and dunning maturity. Chargebee's Flow plan is priced against the billing volume you run through it, and unlike Lago Premium the rate card is public: $0 platform fee plus 0.80% of monthly billing value pay-as-you-go, or $99/mo plus 0.65% if you commit monthly, both including 100M usage events a month. Enterprise is quoted by conversation.
The percentage is the part that scales against you. What it buys is depth: Chargebee's dunning and revenue-recovery tooling, plus its quote-to-cash add-ons, go further than anything Lago, BuildBase or a from-scratch Stripe integration ships out of the box.
Stripe Billing - if you already live on Stripe. Stripe's own subscription and invoicing layer charges 0.7% of billing volume on top of standard processing fees, with a Meters API for usage-based charges and Smart Retries for automated dunning. The percentage applies to recurring volume billed on and off Stripe, and one-off invoices are excluded.
See Stripe Billing alternatives for the fuller breakdown of that side of the field.
BuildBase - billing as one module, not one vendor. The billing module runs on the org's own Stripe account and adds subscription plans with versioning, trials, usage-based and seat-based billing, a credit system with ledger tracking, and per-workspace invoicing - it is not a standalone metering product, it is one of 20 modules in the same instance as auth, workspaces and RBAC.
Launch starts at $49/mo for 25,000 MAU; Grow and Scale raise every ceiling from there. There is no free plan, though every plan carries a 7-day trial that does not ask for a card.
| Feature | BuildBase | Lago |
|---|---|---|
| Self-hosted, free tier | Not free - Docker self-host on a paid plan | Free under AGPLv3 (Community edition) |
| Entry paid plan | $49/mo (Launch), flat | Lago Premium, quote-only |
| Charge models | Usage-based and seat-based on Stripe | Eight models: per-unit, graduated, package, volume, and more |
| Ownership | Independent (Jagodana LLC) | Independent - unlike Metronome (Stripe) and Orb (Adyen) |
| Scope | 20 modules: billing, auth, workspaces, RBAC, one instance | Billing and metering only |
Where Lago wins
Two things Lago does better, and neither is close.
Metering throughput. ClickHouse's own case study on Lago's migration to ClickHouse Cloud describes one customer's ingestion needs approaching a million events per second. Read the top figure as a demonstrated ceiling for one customer rather than a guarantee, but the shape is real - a bundled billing module is not going to out-throughput a system built for exactly this job.
A genuinely free, source-published self-hosted tier. Lago's Community edition costs nothing and the code is public under AGPLv3 on GitHub. BuildBase's self-hosted option runs on your own infrastructure too, but it is not free and it is not published under an open license - you are paying for the platform either way.
How to actually decide
Ask what you were actually leaving Lago for. If the honest answer is "I need Premium features and don't want a quote-only price," Metronome and Orb hand you the same problem under a different logo now that both are quote-only subsidiaries of larger payment companies. Chargebee and Stripe Billing at least publish a number, and both of those numbers are a percentage of what you bill - run that rate against the crossover point where it costs more than a flat plan before assuming either one is cheap at your revenue level.
If the honest answer is "billing was never the only integration I needed," that's the case for a bundled platform, and the tradeoff is giving up the metering depth a dedicated engine gives you in exchange for not building auth, workspaces and RBAC as three more vendor relationships. We priced what that separate-vendor stack costs in the real monthly cost of Clerk plus Stripe plus Lago plus Knock, and what wiring workspaces and RBAC looks like on its own in multi-tenant workspaces in an afternoon.
And if the honest answer is "entitlements and packaging experiments are the actual axis, not raw metering throughput," that's a closer fit for Stigg vs BuildBase than for anything else on this page.
Both completion dates above trace to the acquirer's own announcement: Stripe's newsroom post for Metronome, Adyen's press release for Orb. Adyen states its $335 million figure directly; Stripe has not officially disclosed Metronome's deal size, so the ~$1B figure here is a widely reported estimate, not a vendor-confirmed one. Every BuildBase figure comes from PLANS and PLAN_FACTS in packages/shared/src/constants/platform-stats.ts, verified 9 September 2026. The Chargebee and Stripe Billing rates were read off chargebee.com/pricing and stripe.com/billing/pricing, verified 24 September 2026. Percentage pricing moves, so check both before budgeting against them.