Best Billing software

Lago is an open-source billing platform giving teams transparency, control and flexibility to manage any pricing model, offered both as source that can be self-hosted and as a managed cloud service, with an API and a visual interface.

Open source is the defining choice and in billing it addresses an unusually sharp concern. Billing is the most consequential system a software company runs: if it is wrong, customers are overcharged or revenue is lost silently, and neither is discovered quickly. Being able to read the code that calculates an invoice, rather than trusting a vendor's description of it, is a materially different position. Self-hosting also answers data residency and security questions that arise when billing data includes every customer's consumption pattern.

The dual API and visual interface is aimed at a specific organisational reality that Lago names directly: engineering and business teams have to collaborate on complex billing. Engineers implement metering and integrate the API; finance and revenue operations define plans, adjust prices and investigate disputes. A system offering only an API leaves finance dependent on engineering for routine changes, and one offering only a UI leaves engineers unable to automate.

Usage metering underpins the platform, with invoicing and billing built on top for any pricing model, and Lago describes itself as AI-native in its current positioning. The open-source distribution means a company can begin self-hosted and move to cloud, or evaluate the real implementation before committing. Cloud pricing is not published; the open-source edition can be run at infrastructure cost.

Stripe is a payment processing platform that lets businesses accept credit cards, debit cards, and dozens of other payment methods online, in person, and across borders through a single API. It is used by companies ranging from small online stores to large public companies, combining a checkout and billing product suite with tools for fraud prevention, tax calculation, and marketplace payouts.

Beyond core payments, Stripe offers Connect for platforms and marketplaces, Radar for machine learning fraud detection, Terminal for in-person card readers, and Billing for subscription management. Pricing is pay as you go with no monthly fee for standard accounts, and large businesses can negotiate custom volume-based rates.

Chargebee is a subscription billing platform that handles recurring invoicing, checkout, self-serve customer portals and multiple pricing models including flat fee, tiered, volume, usage-based and hybrid charges on a single financial record. It supports 40-plus payment gateways and 100-plus billing currencies, includes built-in ASC 606 and IFRS 15 revenue recognition compliance, and offers AI-assisted retention tools for reducing cancellations and recovering failed payments.

Chargebee Billing offers a free Starter plan for businesses processing under $250,000 in cumulative billing, after which a 0.75 percent fee applies to further volume. A Performance plan costs $7,188 per year for up to $100,000 in monthly billing, and an Enterprise plan is available with custom pricing for multi-entity or high-volume operations. Chargebee also sells separate CPQ, revenue recognition and retention products, each with their own plans.

Recurly is a subscription management and recurring billing platform that automates invoicing, tax calculation, dunning and payment recovery for subscription businesses. It supports fixed, volume, tiered, stairstep, usage-based and one-time billing models, along with more than a dozen payment methods including cards, PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, ACH and SEPA, and automatically calculates taxes such as VAT and GST across 47 countries. Reporting covers MRR, churn, plan performance and recovered revenue.

Recurly's Starter plan costs $249 per month plus 0.9% of billing volume, with the first $40,000 in monthly billings included and a 90-day free trial available. Its higher All-Access plan is priced as under 1% of billing volume for businesses with at least $1 million in annual billing volume, and separate Engage (from $1,600/month) and RevRec (from $850/month) products add AI-driven churn prevention and revenue recognition respectively.

Zuora is a subscription order-to-cash platform used by enterprises to manage product catalogs, billing and revenue recognition for any mix of one-time, recurring and usage-based charges. Zuora Billing supports numerous pricing models, mid-cycle plan changes, and account hierarchies, while Zuora Payments provides a central orchestration layer across more than 40 payment gateways and 20-plus payment methods with AI-optimized retry logic for failed payments.

Zuora does not publish public pricing; contracts are quote-based and customized around projected billing volume, subscriber count, module bundling and contract term, typically negotiated directly with Zuora's sales team. The platform also includes tax compliance, e-invoicing, CPQ integration and a full API for custom business logic.

Solvimon is an AI billing and monetisation platform covering metering, usage-based billing, collections and revenue recognition, positioned as IPO-ready and serving AI-native usage-based startups through to large enterprises.

IPO-ready is a specific claim rather than a general boast, and it names the moment billing systems fail. A company preparing to go public has its revenue recognition examined in detail by auditors and regulators, and a billing system that cannot produce an auditable trail from metered usage through invoice to recognised revenue becomes an obstacle at exactly the point when replacing it is hardest. Building for that end state from the start is the argument.

Seatless pricing is called out as its own concept and it identifies where software monetisation is heading. Per-seat pricing assumes value scales with the number of humans using a product, which was true of collaboration software and is false of AI products where one person can generate enormous consumption. Billing systems built around seats cannot express that, and companies changing their pricing model discover their billing platform is the constraint.

Solvimon publishes a direct cost comparison against Stripe on payment processing, showing standard European consumer cards at 1.1 percent plus 0.20 euros against 1.5 percent plus 0.25 euros, and international cards at 2.85 percent plus 0.20 euros against 3.15 percent plus 0.25 euros, describing Stripe as more than 30 percent more expensive. Direct debit is supported via Stripe and Adyen. The Starter tier is 2,500 dollars a month subject to qualification criteria, with Growth on custom pricing.

Paddle handles subscriptions, payments and tax compliance for software and games companies, operating as a merchant of record so that it, rather than the seller, is the legal party to each transaction.

The merchant of record model is the whole proposition and it is a genuinely different arrangement from a payment processor. When Paddle is the merchant, it takes on the obligation to register for, collect, file and remit sales tax and VAT in every jurisdiction where a customer buys. For a software company selling globally, that obligation is otherwise unbounded: digital goods rules differ by country and often by state, thresholds trigger registration requirements the seller may not notice crossing, and non-compliance accrues quietly until it surfaces as a liability.

The trade-off is priced accordingly and Paddle is upfront about it. Subscription billing and payments add up to 3.9 percent, international card payments add up to 4.4 percent, and full tax registration, filing and remittance adds 0.5 percent. That is meaningfully more than a bare payment processor charges, and the honest comparison is not against processing fees alone but against processing plus the cost of a tax compliance function.

Advanced churn recovery is an add-on at 0.02 to 0.07 dollars, and Paddle notes that sellers with products under 10 dollars or requiring invoicing should ask for custom pricing, since the fixed component of each transaction dominates at low ticket prices. Paddle serves software and games companies from startup to enterprise, with migration services, implementation support and a RevenueCat integration.

Maxio provides billing and financial reporting for B2B SaaS companies, covering configure-price-quote, subscription management, usage-based billing, revenue recognition, accounts receivable management, payments and metrics reporting across more than 20 payment gateways.

Including revenue recognition rather than leaving it to accounting is what makes Maxio a finance system rather than a billing tool. Subscription revenue must be recognised over the service period rather than when the cash arrives, and once contracts involve mid-term upgrades, prorations, multi-year terms and usage components, calculating that correctly in a spreadsheet becomes both laborious and genuinely risky. A SaaS company preparing for audit, a funding round or an acquisition needs those numbers to survive scrutiny.

Configure-price-quote at the front of the same system closes the loop that usually breaks. A deal negotiated with a bespoke discount, a ramp and a custom term is agreed in one system and then re-entered into billing by hand, and every difference between what was signed and what gets invoiced is either lost revenue or a conversation with an unhappy customer. Handling quote through to recognised revenue in one place removes that transcription entirely.

Billing for AI is called out separately, reflecting that AI products have priced themselves in ways subscription billing was never designed for, with token consumption, model tiers and inference costs varying per customer. A Model Context Protocol integration is offered alongside conventional gateways and an API. Pricing starts at 599 dollars a month for up to 100,000 dollars in monthly billing.

Orb describes itself as a revenue design platform rather than a billing tool, organised into billing for metering and invoicing usage, pricing for modelling and iterating on plans, and finance for contracting, collecting and closing.

Treating pricing as a discipline the software supports, rather than a configuration it stores, is the distinguishing idea. Most billing systems assume a company knows its prices and needs them applied. Orb's premise is that modern companies change pricing repeatedly, and that the ability to model a change, understand its effect on existing customers and roll it out without breaking historic contracts is itself the hard part. Any company that has tried to migrate a customer base onto a new pricing model recognises that as the real work.

Backdating and backfilling changes is called out under accuracy and it is a revealing detail. Usage data arrives late, is occasionally wrong, and sometimes needs correcting after invoices have issued. A billing system that cannot restate a period without manual credit notes forces finance teams into spreadsheets at exactly the moment accuracy matters most.

Granular usage metering underpins all of it, since a system can only bill for what it can measure precisely, and consumption pricing puts far more weight on the meter than seat-based billing ever did. Orb publishes a revenue design playbook alongside the product, positioning the concept as a methodology rather than a feature list. Documentation is public. Pricing is not published and is arranged through sales.

Metronome is a usage-based billing platform aimed at companies launching consumption products, with published rates charging a percentage of billing volume alongside a per-event fee, and an explicit focus on AI infrastructure.

Charging 0.8 percent of billing volume with events billed at 0.04 dollars is an aligned pricing model and a deliberate one. A billing platform paid as a share of what it bills succeeds precisely when its customer does, which removes the usual friction where a growing company finds its billing subscription becoming a fixed cost disconnected from anything. The separate events charge reflects that metering volume and revenue are different quantities: an AI product can generate enormous event counts against modest revenue.

Naming AI infrastructure as an industry rather than a use case reflects where usage-based billing has become unavoidable. An inference API cannot sensibly be sold per seat, its cost structure is genuinely consumption-based, and the pricing units are new enough that most billing systems have no concept for them. Companies in that position are not choosing usage billing as a strategy; they have no alternative.

Pricing levers are given their own section, which points at the practical problem of running consumption pricing: committed spend, overage rates, credits, free tiers and volume discounts all interact, and changing one affects revenue in ways that are hard to predict. Solutions are framed by role for product, engineering and finance, since those three want very different things from a billing system. Metronome runs its own Monetize conference and publishes a changelog, whitepaper and customer stories.