Lago

Lago hit #1 on Product Hunt: Cheese *AND* Desserts as the 🇫🇷 say: Product of the Day, Week, *AND* Month. Here's 9 tips if you're serious about winning on Product Hunt and we *open-sourced* our handbook on Github! 1️⃣ Budget a month of preparation Start prepping 4+ weeks before if it’s your first launch. Read best practices, find a hunter, create an account and be active, prepare the visual assets, wording and communication. Keep reading for our free Notion template. 2️⃣ Define what ‘success’ is for your launch Go beyond the goal of ‘getting the maximum number of upvotes’. Sales > Upvotes Figure out a # goal and shoot for it. Then track your goal ruthlessly. 3️⃣ Create a teaser for your launch. Teasers notify subscribers when you launch! We had dozens of subscribers pre-launch. It's totally free to do on Product Hunt, so don't skip it. 4️⃣ Copy is key We reworked our copy at least 5 times. Concision and precision are key. When posting on social media about your launch, only include 1 CTA linking to your launch page. Keep the focus high. 5️⃣ Don’t spam I get way too many spam random requests from strangers. These don’t work and are disrespectful of the recipients’ time. Rely on your existing community: Twitter or Linkedin followers, newsletter, etc. Skip the spam. Do the work of personalization, it compounds. 6️⃣ A day is 24 hours, and this applies to your launch day too. It’s the ‘number of upvotes per hour’ that counts. Make sure to post and engage all day long, with different messages and contents. We scheduled posts to continue posting at night. 7️⃣ Comments are king Product Hunt values interaction, so talking to the commenters is a MUST. Have people from your team manning the comments throughout the day. Answer questions, ask questions, engage! 8️⃣ It takes a village Tell the whole company early, keep them informed, and include them in the launch. We asked every team member to fill a list of friends or contacts that would resonate with the launch Don't they look awesome on this pic?! 9️⃣ Make it fun! Launching can be pretty stressful so you've gotta make it fun. Our Mascot Maneki was a big part of it! Try to be IRL with your team if you can. And make sure you've got coffee, Red Bull, and memes ready for posting! -> Handbook here 🫶: https://lnkd.in/eaJSVptf

When we pivoted to building an "open-source usage-based billing API", I was warned that "it was like building 2 companies, 2 motions": 1️⃣ Open-source, community-led 2️⃣ A more commercial/B2B SaaS one -> Twice as difficult The reality is (as usual) more nuanced than that. But it's definitely intense :) (and Raffi Sarkissian, Jérémy Denquin, Mathieu Déjean can testify) And the feeling we have when we see the Github stars take off (6,400 ⭐️!!!), and when community members respond to each other on Lago's Slack is all worth it 🫶!!! Thanks Karl Kloppenborg, super grateful for the community, and proud of the team 🙌

AI IS EXPENSIVE 💸 For many SaaS applications, if a user doesn’t pay, it’s not a big deal. Sure, that implies that they are churning, which translates to lost revenue, but the cost of the service was likely minimal. However, with AI, this isn’t exactly the case. AI is expensive. If a user racks up a massive AI bill and doesn’t pay, then the entire customer account may be unprofitable to the business. Thankfully, there are a few pricing models that mitigate this risk. We support leading AI cos with implementing the relevant pricing systems from day 1 at Lago, for instance: 1️⃣ Prepayment The obvious solution to a customer not paying is to request prepayment. If users pre-purchased tokens (or whatever unit) in advance, there is no risk of a lack of payment. The credits are just consumed over time. This creates a new challenge, however. Customer accounts cannot just grind to a halt if credits are exhausted. That would be punishing the best users. Rather, companies need to automatically top-up credits whenever they run dry or tolerate some level of negative balances. 2️⃣ Threshold charging The other solution is to bill customers whenever usage crosses a reasonable threshold. For instance, if a company can tolerate a $5,000 loss, then they can bill the client whenever they reach $2,500 in costs. If they reach another $2,500 tranche without paying the last invoice, then service can be cut-off. This is particularly reasonable if the payment method is set to auto-pay. While this does introduce some risk, it may be preferred over prepayment if there are concerns that prepayment will negatively impact sales. It also transparently provides the customer with a reminder of their spending rate. ⚠ There is a complication with this strategy, however. Some customers may reach the billing threshold really slowly. Hypothetically, some might never reach it. To address this, customers should still be billed at a monthly (or yearly) cadence. That way, their balance is wiped out, restarting the cycle. 3️⃣ Spending minimums Sometimes, metered pricing may also have spending minimums. This is independent of a subscription tier—the minimum is applied to units (e.g. tokens) used. For example, if the minimum is 5M tokens / month, and the user only used 3M tokens last month, then they’ll still be charged for the full 5M. Spending minimums might often equal one base unit. For instance, if the rate is $5.00 / 1M tokens, and 1M tokens was the minimum, then any value below a single base unit (e.g. 800K tokens) would round up. 4️⃣ Enterprise contracts AI companies often offer enterprise contracts with negotiated prices. This rises the need to tailor prices, thresholds, and packages for each individual enterprise customer. This personalization can sometimes be expensive; maintaining unique pricing for each contract naturally leads to a bigger administrative overhead. It also mandates for a more flexible billing system to account for the variations.

*The* best perk as a founder? Lifestyle? Free 🍕🍺 at tech meetups? 😅 No...Learning from fantastic people who combine both an invaluable experience and kindness, thanks Meghan Gill for supporting Lago as an 😇 and for sharing the learnings from your journey at MongoDB! MongoDB is such a success today, but it probably wasn't an obvious bet *at all* when Meghan Gill joined as the 1st business employee 14 years ago (if you think Open-Source is still under the radar today, imagine how it was at the time) 🙌

🙈 I thought I had kept track of everything that is happening at Lago! I've missed this one and just discovered it while onboarding our new joiners. Raffi Sarkissian explains how Mistral.ai used Lago to implement their usage metering and billing system... and how any team can do it too, in a 4-step template. 👏 🙌 So proud of the team! ✨🫶

Most execs and founders we meet don't know how much they pay to Stripe. And don't get me wrong, they are brilliant, and on top of things. The reason is that Stripe's pricing is (purposely?) confusing. 21 products 🤯 Most companies use several of them without even knowing it. 🤯 🤯 Each product has its own pricing. 🤯 🤯 🤯 Cost adds up. 🤯 🤯 🤯 🤯 That's why Raffi Sarkissian and our team built a "Stripe Fee Calculator". We had to simplify it (the famous 80/20 rule), it will give you ballpark numbers though, when/if you want to evaluate alternative stacks, for each of their product: - Payments - Taxes - Billing etc

Although we're not hiring a 'Growth Hacker', we're hiring our 'Go-to-Market' team : https://lnkd.in/dFQ4Wad6 ! Who should we talk to?

Open-source startups don't win by being cheaper. I’ve heard, “This product is X, but open source" way too many times And the main value prop people give is that it'll be cheaper. OSS companies win by: 1️⃣ Making profit 2️⃣ Being transparent 3️⃣ Being extensible Let's dive into each: 1️⃣ - Profit, not usage, is a measure of success in open-source startups - Profit, not usage, lets you hire employees, grow, and sustain your biz This is how MongoDB grew into one of largest databases with 4k+ employees Just because it's open-source doesn't mean you can't make profit. That's why open-source doesn't win by being cheaper. Building a cheaper alternative is typically a ticket to future bankruptcy. Most open-source solutions aren't replacing a top-three line item so big companies don't care enough to switch. Being cheaper doesn't mean you win. 2️⃣ Open-source mainly wins when there's a transparency problem in the market. - PostHog solves the transparency problems around Amplitude - MinIO solves transparency problem around AWS billing - Our startup Lago solves the transparency problems around billing, payment, revenue, and Stripe fees 3️⃣ Open-source also wins by solving an extensibility problem. Open source allows the development of niche features to the community. Integrations and plugins are usually built by community devs and then merged into the main branch. Ex. Airbyte, Elastic, Formance and SuperTokens ✨ TL;DR Open-source startups only win when: - they make profit, not just get usage - there's transparency problems - there's extensibility problems See these problems in the market? Build open-source. Trying to do it because it's hot? Don't bother.

🚀 Lago <> Stripe Integration: Your top questions answered here! 🚀 We often get asked about our native integration with Stripe. Here are the top questions from our open source community: 1. How does Lago integrate with Stripe? 2. Should I define my products, prices, and subscriptions in Stripe if they’re already in Lago? 3. Do I need Stripe Billing if I use Lago Billing? 4. Are payments and refunds triggered automatically? 5. How do you generate checkout URLs? We've got you covered! Find all the answers about our seamless Lago <> Stripe Payments integration right here. 💡

College students and recent grads — join us at Startup School in San Francisco on July 27! It's a free, one-day conference where you’ll hear stories and practical advice from founders and YC partners. If you’re thinking about starting a startup one day, or are in the earliest stages of building one, we hope to meet you there. This year's speakers include: • Sam Altman [OpenAI] • Christina Cacioppo [Vanta] • Anh-Tho Chuong [Lago] • Emily Damato [MantleBio] • james hawkins [PostHog] • Kesava Kirupa Dinakaran [Luminai] • Vlad Matsiiako [Infisical] • Han Wang [Mintlify] • Dima Goncharov [Metriport] • Trey Benedict [Pure (YC S23)] • Gabriel Birnbaum [Can of Soup] • YC Partners Dalton Caldwell, Nicolas Dessaigne, Diana Hu, Jared Friedman, Michael Seibel, Harj Taggar, Garry Tan and more!