Lago vs BuildBase: a billing engine or the whole backend?
Lago is a deep, open-source usage-metering and billing engine. BuildBase bundles billing with auth, RBAC and workspaces. Where each one actually fits.
In short
Lago is an open-source billing engine: free to self-host, eight charge models, built for real scale. BuildBase bundles billing with auth, RBAC and workspaces as one instance. If metering depth is the whole problem, Lago wins it. If billing is one of several systems you still have to build, the bundle is cheaper.
Every "Lago alternatives" post on the first page compares Lago against Stripe Billing, Chargebee, Orb, Metronome, the rest of the metered-billing field. None of them ask the question that actually matters to a team wiring billing into a new product: are you buying a billing engine, or trying to avoid building the four systems that sit next to it?
Lago answers the first question extremely well. BuildBase is built around the second.
The one-paragraph answer
Lago is a dedicated billing and metering engine, open source, and free to self-host. If usage metering is your hard problem - complex charge models, high-volume event ingestion, invoicing you want full control over - Lago is built for exactly that and does it deeper than a bundled module ever will. If your actual problem is that billing is the fourth or fifth vendor you're about to add next to auth, workspaces and RBAC, BuildBase ships all of it as one instance, and the cost of stitching those pieces together is what you're really paying when you pick point solutions one at a time.
What each one replaces
Lago replaces the billing engine specifically: Stripe's usage-based limits, or a hand-rolled events table and a cron job that reconciles it monthly. Nothing else. You still bring your own auth, your own workspace model, your own RBAC.
BuildBase replaces more of the stack around billing, not instead of it. Subscriptions, trials, credits and usage metering sync to Stripe the same way Lago's does, but it sits inside a platform that also ships authentication across eight methods, multi-tenant workspaces, role-based permissions and workflow automation.
Nineteen modules, one SDK, one instance - a quota belongs to a workspace, a workspace has members, and that relationship is not glue code you write yourself.
Pricing and openness, verified 17 August 2026
Lago's open-source edition is free, self-hosted, and published under AGPLv3 on GitHub. The paid product is Lago Premium, offered as managed cloud or self-hosted, and priced by talking to sales rather than by a public rate card.
| Feature | BuildBase | Lago |
|---|---|---|
| Self-hosted, free tier | Not free - Docker self-host on a paid plan | Free under AGPLv3 |
| Entry paid plan | $49/mo (Launch) | Lago Premium, quote-only |
| Trial | 7 days, no card required | Not published for Lago Premium |
| Charge models | Usage-based and seat-based on Stripe | Eight models: per-unit, graduated, package, volume, and more |
| Scope | 19 modules, one instance | Billing and metering only |
BuildBase has no free plan. Say that plainly next to the trial: seven days, no card needed, on any plan, which is a different offer than "free forever" and worth being honest about rather than dressing up.
Where the models actually diverge
Lago exists to be the best possible billing engine, full stop, and that focus shows in the charge-model list. Per-unit, graduated, package, percentage, volume, dynamic, custom and progressive - eight ways to shape a price, versus BuildBase's usage-based and seat-based billing riding on top of Stripe's own pricing primitives.
If your pricing model is genuinely unusual, Lago gives you more knobs. The same question shows up one comparison over: if entitlements and packaging experiments are the actual hard part rather than raw metering throughput, Stigg's pricing layer goes deeper on that specific slice than either of us.
What Lago does not give you is the rest of the product. Metering has to know who the user is, which workspace they belong to, and whether their role even allows the action being metered. That's three systems Lago assumes you already have.
We built the metering module to answer straight into workspaces and RBAC for exactly this reason. PlugNode, one of our own products, runs its usage-based credit metering on top of BuildBase auth and team workspaces with RBAC already in place - the meter never has to ask a second system who the user is or what they're allowed to do. Bolt a metering engine on after the fact and you're wiring that question yourself, every time, for every product.
Where Lago wins
Two things Lago does better, and they're not close.
Metering depth and scale. ClickHouse's March 2026 case study on Lago's migration to ClickHouse Cloud describes moving from 10,000-20,000 events per second to a claimed one million. It is a vendor case study, so read the top number as a ceiling rather than a guarantee - but the shape is real. That is a purpose-built ingestion pipeline, and a bundled billing module is not going to out-throughput a system whose entire job is ingesting metering events.
A genuinely free tier with the source published. Lago's self-hosted edition costs nothing and the code is public under AGPLv3. BuildBase's self-hosted option runs on your own infrastructure too, but it does not ship under an open license, and it is not free - you're paying for the platform either way.
How to actually decide
Ask what breaks first. If it's "our pricing model is too complex for a standard usage-based charge," that's a Lago problem, and you should go build on the tool whose only job is solving it.
If it's "we need billing, and also auth, and also workspaces, and also a way to tell who's allowed to see what," that's four separate integrations sitting behind four separate vendor relationships, and the cost of wiring them together is the number nobody puts on a pricing page. We priced one version of that stack in the real monthly cost of Clerk plus Stripe plus Lago plus Knock.
Our numbers live at /pricing. Lago's self-hosted edition lives on GitHub, and Lago Premium lives behind a sales conversation - check both before you commit, because neither one sits still for long.