Our take
Activeregular commits and releases- Activity
- 70
- Community
- 78
- Issues
- 31
- Pull requests
- 73
+117 stars in the last 30 days
- Releases more often than 79% of the projects we track
- Slower to close issues than 95% of the projects we track
Lago is an actively maintained, broad billing platform with a substantial contributor base, though its measured issue-resolution times suggest that open issues may take a long time to close.
Good fit if
- You need usage metering connected to pricing, invoicing, and payment collection in one API-first system.
- You want to self-host, or need Lago Embedded to provide billing capabilities to your customers.
- AGPL-3.0 is compatible with your deployment and distribution plans.
Look elsewhere if
- You need a permissively licensed billing component, since this repository uses AGPL-3.0.
- You only need a lightweight usage counter or payment integration, rather than a platform covering metering through revenue analytics.
- You require fast resolution of reported issues, given the measured long median time to close issues.
All health signals
| Last commit | 2026-10-21 (2 days ago) |
|---|---|
| Commits, last 90 days | 54 |
| Releases, last 12 months | 29 (latest v1.55.0, 2026-10-07) |
| Contributors | 49 (top contributor: 26% of commits) |
| Issues closed, last 90 days | 3 (typically closed in 469 days) |
| Pull requests merged, last 90 days | 48 (typically merged in 0 days) |
| Project age | 4 years |
Checked on 2026-10-24 with the GitHub API.
Project history
Daily GitHub snapshots since Oct 7, 2026. History covers stars and forks; health signals are not tracked historically.
Stars
10,786Forks
785Change since Nov 9, 2026: +5 stars·0 forks
Overview
Lago is a Go-based, API-first monetization platform that connects product usage to revenue. It helps teams meter events such as tokens, compute, or API calls, then apply pricing and credits, manage entitlements, generate invoices, and collect payments without making a payment provider's product catalog the source of truth.
It supports two operating models: Lago Direct for billing your own customers, and Lago Embedded for offering billing capabilities to your customers through a platform. Teams can self-host Lago or use Lago Cloud, with APIs, SDKs, webhooks, and a UI for billing workflows.
Key Features
- Ingest usage events with filters, dimensions, custom aggregations, batch ingestion, and idempotency by
transaction_id. - Model usage-based, recurring, prepaid, graduated, package, volume, and hybrid pricing, along with minimum commitments.
- Manage allowances, entitlements, credit grants, prepaid wallets, top-ups, and usage alerts.
- Handle subscriptions, invoices, credit notes, taxes, multiple currencies, and customer-specific pricing.
- Orchestrate payment providers, retries, dunning, and payment-status synchronization.
- Inspect usage, MRR, invoice, customer, and revenue analytics.
- Integrate through REST APIs, SDKs for Node.js, Python, Ruby, and Go, webhooks, and an MCP server.
Use Cases
- An AI product team meters input and output tokens by model and turns consumption into customer charges.
- A developer-tool provider bills for API calls, compute, or other measured workloads rather than relying only on fixed subscriptions.
- A finance or operations team manages invoices, credits, payment collection, and revenue analytics across subscription plans.
- A platform or marketplace offers metering and billing to its own customers through Lago Embedded and a white-label experience.
What you need
Detected in the repository
- Go (main language on GitHub)
- A Compose file to run it with its related services
- Automated checks on GitHub Actions
License in plain words
AGPL-3.0network copyleft
- Commercial use: yes
- Modify and redistribute: yes
- You must keep: the license notice
- Share your changes: yes, the full source, also when people only use it over a network (e.g. as a hosted service)
- Includes an explicit patent grant from the contributors:
A summary, not legal advice: the LICENSE file is what applies.
Getting Started
For a local deployment with Docker Compose:
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/getlago/lago.git
cd lago
echo "LAGO_RSA_PRIVATE_KEY=\"$(openssl genrsa 2048 | openssl base64 -A)\"" >> .env
docker compose up -d
See the README and self-hosted deployment guide for configuration and production deployment details.
Alternatives
- openmeter: OpenMeter focuses on real-time event metering and access limits, while Lago provides a broader billing platform for pricing, credits, invoices, and payments.
| Project | Language | License | Stars | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| lago | Go | AGPL-3.0 | 10.7k | Active |
| openmeter | Go | Apache-2.0 | 2.4k | Active |
Considerations
- Self-hosting involves operating Lago and its supporting services. The README points to deployment guidance for persistent storage, SMTP, TLS, object storage, Redis, database configuration, and upgrades.
- The project is actively developed, with recent commits and regular releases, and contributions are not heavily concentrated in one person. However, measured issue handling is slow, so do not assume an open issue will receive a prompt resolution.
- The AGPL-3.0 license needs review if you plan to modify or distribute the platform or provide it as a service.
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