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by AnhTho_FR 1424 days ago
Lago founder here. FWIW we love what Baptiste did with Microinvoice!

I can only speak for what we've experienced first hand, in our prev. company (a $5B B2B fintech) we spent a lot of time around billing x invoicing in pdf :

- When billing is complex (lots of fees, different billing cycles, usage based consumption) - And you need to have a clear "invoice presentation" to avoid triggering questions (that is maintained while you iterate on pricing, launch new products or countries) the "template isn't really a solved problem", and our eng. team did rebuild the system in-house. We would have avoided it if it could have been possible and looked at every possible option, in-depth.

We've seen similar needs for marketplaces or vertical saas as well.

However thanks for the feedback, we could have done a better job at explaining why it can be a pain in specific use cases! And I was the 1st person to say, when I first discover the painpoint "there must be an existing solution for that, please don't build anything in-house".

1 comments

> When billing is complex (lots of fees, different billing cycles, usage based consumption)

So does Lago have a template for all these use cases? What happens when a new unique case comes up? Is Lago flexible enough to handle all the cases? Current and future ones? How is that different than having a flexible template? What actually is the problem with that?

We make the whole fee calculation easy to do. If you have a paying feature, the charge related to it can be implemented in few minutes. We handle automatically the upgrades, downgrades, invoices, subscription dates and boundaries, and a lot of prebuilt charge model (graduated pricing, percentage pricing, package pricing…). We adapt to any pricing use case easily!
Invoices contain VAT and even more complex taxes and charges. How much of your calculations is tied to specific cases like a USA company billing another USA company? What's your story for international customers and/or international operations?