Managed Lago Hosting — production-ready from $15 a month
Open-source metering and usage-based billing platform. Deployed on your own dedicated instance in AWS, Azure, or GCP, kept patched, backed up, and monitored by ManageStacks — standard Lago, no lock-in.
Lago on ManageStacks is the open-source usage-based billing engine deployed to your own AWS, Azure, or GCP region — flat per-app pricing from $15 a month ($29 on the Standard production plan) with no per-event fees, no revenue share, and full ownership of your billing data. Replace Stripe Billing or Chargebee metering without vendor lock-in.
What does Lago do, and why do teams deploy it?
Lago is an open-source metering and usage-based billing platform designed for engineering teams that need granular control over how they meter, rate, and invoice product usage. It ingests raw usage events via API, applies configurable aggregation and pricing models (per-unit, graduated, package, percentage), and outputs invoices, credit notes, and webhook events that slot into any payment gateway.
Unlike Stripe Billing or Chargebee, Lago gives you full visibility into the rating pipeline. You define billable metrics, attach them to plans with flexible pricing rules, and Lago computes charges in real time. Coupons, prepaid credits, add-ons, and minimum commitments are first-class primitives — not bolted-on workarounds. The event ingestion API handles millions of events per hour, making it suitable for infrastructure, API, and AI-token billing at scale.
Self-hosting Lago requires PostgreSQL, Redis, a Sidekiq worker fleet, and careful capacity planning around event ingestion throughput. ManageStacks provisions the full stack — database, cache, workers, event queue, SSL, backups — so your billing team ships pricing models instead of debugging Sidekiq retries.
- Real-time event ingestion API for usage metering at scale
- Flexible pricing models: per-unit, graduated, tiered, package, percentage
- Prepaid credits, coupons, add-ons, and minimum spend commitments
- Automated invoice generation with PDF output and tax integration
- Webhook-driven architecture for payment gateway integration
- Multi-currency and multi-timezone billing support
Open-source metering and usage-based billing platform
Lago as a self-hosted alternative to Stripe Billing and Chargebee
Instead of paying per-seat fees to a SaaS vendor, teams self-host Lago to keep full control of their data and infrastructure. ManageStacks removes the operational overhead — you get the cost and privacy benefits of open source with the reliability of a managed platform.
What does managed Lago hosting cost?
Flat per-app pricing, in your chosen AWS, Azure, or GCP region. No per-user pricing — a busy deployment costs the same as a quiet one.
Starter
Staging and internal tools. Dedicated instance, TLS, daily backups, managed upgrades.
Standard
Production workloads. Adds monitoring, staging environment, region choice, priority support.
Business
High-traffic and compliance workloads. Adds a high-availability replica and same-day support.
24×7 SRE retainer
Round-the-clock on-call across every hosted application, for teams that need a pager answered at 3am.
When is self-hosting Lago the right answer instead?
“Managed hosting is not always the correct call.”
Self-host when a platform team already runs the infrastructure and on-call rotation to operate Lago at genuinely low marginal cost. Self-host when compliance requires an air-gapped or on-premises deployment that no hosted option can satisfy. And self-host when the deployment depends on heavy customisation with a fast internal build-deploy loop, because an internal release process will beat any managed change process.
For everyone else — teams whose engineers have better things to do than shepherd upgrades — managed hosting is cheaper than the hours it replaces.
Which cloud should Lago run on — AWS, Azure or GCP?
For most workloads, the choice of cloud matters less than proximity: run Lago in the same cloud and region as the applications and data it talks to, because every request between them adds a round trip. The underlying compute performs equivalently across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
In practice, an existing cloud footprint decides it. All plans support all three clouds, and moving regions later is a scheduled migration, not a rebuild.
Deepest managed-service catalog, default when there's no existing footprint
Best fit for teams already on Microsoft 365 or Entra ID
Strongest for data/analytics-adjacent workloads
Every plan supports AWS, Azure, and GCP — region choice included.
Common questions about Lago on ManageStacks
What is Lago on ManageStacks used for?
Lago is a usage-based billing engine. It ingests product usage events, applies configurable pricing rules, and generates invoices. ManageStacks handles the PostgreSQL, Redis, and Sidekiq infrastructure so your team focuses on pricing models.
How does Lago compare to Stripe Billing?
Stripe Billing is a managed service with per-transaction fees and limited metering flexibility. Lago is open-source with no revenue share, full pricing-model control, and the ability to self-host so billing data stays in your cloud region.
Can Lago handle high-volume event ingestion?
Yes. Lago's event API is designed for millions of events per hour. ManageStacks auto-scales the Sidekiq worker fleet and Redis queue to match your ingestion volume without manual tuning.
Does Lago support multiple pricing models on one plan?
Yes. A single Lago plan can combine per-unit, graduated, tiered, and percentage charges across multiple billable metrics. This lets you model complex pricing like base fee plus overage plus percentage-of-revenue.
Can I migrate from Stripe Billing to Lago?
Yes. Lago's API lets you programmatically create customers, subscriptions, and plans. You can run Lago in parallel with Stripe Billing during migration, then cut over when ready. ManageStacks supports the migration process.
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Run Lago without carrying the pager
Subscribe through your AWS, Azure, or GCP marketplace. We handle provisioning, SSL, monitoring, backups, updates, and security. From $15/mo.