Lago
Open-source metering and usage-based billing built for AI products.
About
Lago is an open-source billing platform centered on event-driven usage metering. Applications send usage events to Lago, which turns them into billable metrics, applies pricing and entitlements, and generates invoices collected through payment providers like Stripe, Adyen, or GoCardless, keeping metering independent from payment processing.
It leans hard into AI billing: token usage split by model, input, output, and cache is a first-class dashboard concept, and the company names Mistral AI, Groq, Synthesia, and PayPal as customers, all vendor-reported. The core is AGPL-3.0 with a commercial Premium tier and a cloud offering; the copyleft license is worth noting since some legal teams will not accept it.
What it can do
- Real-time event ingestion into billable metrics
- Hybrid pricing: subscriptions plus usage overages
- Prepaid credits, entitlements, and customer portal
- REST API, SDKs, webhooks, and MCP server
Setup
Self-host with docker compose up from the getlago/lago repo, or use Lago Cloud.
Prerequisites
A product with meterable usage events.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 8/10
Scored 8/10 (verified tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: Verified via vendor site/docs/GitHub and reputable coverage, wave 96; Trending score 80/100 from researcher assessment.
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.