A Lago alternative you do not have to host.
Lago is an open source metering and billing engine, free to self host under AGPL, with a hosted edition priced by quote. Teams weigh it against yRecurring when they want usage billing without running the infrastructure, a customer portal and recovery out of the box, and a price they can read on a page.
Both engines take usage seriously: idempotent event ingestion, metered charges, prepaid balances and hybrid plans. The difference is what surrounds the engine and who runs it. Lago's core is yours to deploy and operate; its cloud and premium features are sold by quote. yRecurring is hosted, priced on a page, and ships the parts a billing team needs on day one: the customer portal, payment recovery, invoicing with net terms, and a receipt behind every amount.
Side by side
| Lago | yRecurring | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Self hosted: free (AGPL). Cloud and premium: by quote, no public figure | Launch $39, Grow $99, Scale $299 a month, published |
| Hosting | You run Postgres, Redis, workers and upgrades, or buy the cloud edition | Hosted; nothing to run |
| Usage billing | Strong: events, meters, graduated and volume charges | Seven models on one subscription, per million token prices, prepaid credits, cost passthrough |
| Customer portal and recovery | Portal available; automatic dunning is a premium feature on request | Portal, hosted checkout, smart retries and recovery emails included |
| Why is this amount X? | Fee breakdown per invoice | A receipt on every amount: formula, inputs, each step |
| Exports | Invoices and credit notes to CSV; the rest through the API or your database | Everything, any month, in open formats |
Competitor pricing is taken from their public pricing page, checked 24 September 2026. If something here is out of date, tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it. Lago publishes no price for its cloud or premium editions; figures for those are by quote only.
Where Lago is the better fit
- You want to own and modify the billing engine's source, and you have the team to run it.
- Your data must never leave your own infrastructure.
- You are building billing into a larger platform and want an engine, not a product.
Where yRecurring differs
Three plans, published, flat. No quote to request before you know what it costs.
The portal, checkout, invoicing with net terms and payment recovery are built in and maintained; there is no cluster to run and no upgrade to schedule.
Every yRecurring amount links to its calculation: the formula, the inputs, each intermediate step, one click from the invoice.
Prices per million tokens, prepaid credit wallets and passthrough with markup are first class in the pricing engine, at sub cent precision.
Questions teams ask
Is yRecurring open source?
No. It is a hosted product with published pricing and an export you can take any month. If you need the source, Lago is the better fit.
Can I move from Lago to yRecurring?
Yes. Export invoices and credit notes from Lago, pull customers, subscriptions and plans through its API or your own database, and import them with the dry run. Saved cards already live in your Stripe, Adyen or GoCardless account, so they come with you.
Does yRecurring charge a percentage of my revenue?
Plans are flat: $39, $99, or $299 per month, banded by how much you bill through the platform. If you grow past your band mid month, the overage is capped at the next tier's price, so the most a growth month can cost you is the plan you would upgrade to anyway. Your effective rate falls as you grow. Above the Scale band, pricing is custom.
Is yRecurring a merchant of record?
No. Your customers pay through your own payment gateway accounts (Stripe, PayPal, Braintree, GoCardless, and more), so the money and the gateway relationship stay yours. yRecurring is the billing engine: subscriptions, invoices, recovery, and reporting.
See your own pricing in it.
The fastest comparison is your real catalog inside the trial: import your data, dry run first, and look at an invoice with the calculation open.