Best Open Source Billing Platforms for AI and SaaS in 2026

Most billing roundups compare feature checklists. That isn't the decision developers actually face — which is whether to spend a quarter building billing in-house or adopt something you can read, run and extend.

This comparison covers five open source billing platforms in 2026, judged on the things that decide the answer: what the licence really covers, where it can be deployed, whether it meters in real time, how it handles currency and tax, and what it costs to keep running.

What is open source billing software?

Open source billing software meters what customers consume, prices it, generates invoices, and publishes its source code under a licence that lets you run and modify it yourself. The category runs from subscription-and-payments platforms with metering added, through to event-streaming engines built for consumption pricing.

Five checks separate these projects, and they matter more than any feature list:

• Does the licence cover the whole product? MIT, Apache 2.0 and AGPL are all genuinely open, but some projects open-source a metering core and keep the customer portal, role-based access or on-prem deployment in a paid tier.
• Which workload is it built for? Enterprise contract billing, developer-first event metering, and simple invoicing are three different problems — a tool built for one is painful at another.
• Where can it run? Self-hosted containers, on-prem for data residency, or a managed cloud when you'd rather not operate it.
• Is it maintained, and by whom? Named production users and a published support commitment are stronger signals than activity graphs.
• Does it handle your geography? Multi-currency, configurable tax, and payment gateways beyond Stripe decide whether the platform works outside the US.

Key Takeaways

• Open source billing publishes its source under a licence you can run and modify — but the licence and the product aren't always the same scope. Check whether the portal, role-based access and on-prem deployment sit in the free tier.
• Flexprice, Lago, Kill Bill, OpenMeter and Meteroid solve different problems: enterprise-grade usage billing, developer-first event metering, mature subscription and payments, metering infrastructure, and an early-stage Rust engine.
• Stack determines throughput ceiling. Flexprice runs Go + Kafka at 60,000+ events/sec, Lago runs Ruby at ~15,000, and the rest don't publish a figure.
• Payment gateway coverage decides whether a platform works outside the US — most of this category is Stripe-centric.
• Self-hosting removes the licence fee, not the operating cost. Budget a named owner for the billing stack before choosing the self-hosted path.

1. Flexprice

Flexprice is enterprise-grade, open source usage-based billing infrastructure for AI and SaaS companies. It can be deployed in your own VPC, on-prem, or on Flexprice's managed cloud.

It's the strongest option here for teams that need enterprise contract billing and real-time usage metering from the same system — it's the only project on this list that puts both in the free tier.

Licence: AGPL-3.0. Every feature ships in the self-hosted tier with no premium gate — including the customer portal, RBAC, entitlements and CRM sync.

What it's built for: Enterprise contract mechanics in the open source build: parent–child account hierarchies with credits and commitments pooled across subsidiaries, ramped contracts that step pricing up as a customer scales, contract versioning with full amendment history, and audit trails on every pricing change. These sit on a real-time metering core rather than a batch cycle.

Deployment & stack: Processes up to 1M events/sec. Deploys into your own VPC, on-prem, or Flexprice's managed cloud with SOC 2 Type II, SAML SSO and SCIM on the managed Mission Critical plan.

Currency, tax & gateways: Multi-currency billing with automatic conversion, configurable tax rules, and regional pricing built in. Payments run through Stripe, Razorpay, Moyasar and Nomod — so billing across India, the Middle East and Europe runs from one instance.

Production users: Simplismart, Segwise, CASParser, TestZeus, Vapi, Nava, Facilio and Krutrim. Simplismart reclaimed 30% of daily engineering bandwidth and saved over $145K/year after migrating.

Key Features

• Enterprise grade — Parent–child accounts, ramped contracts, contract versioning, RBAC and audit trails, all in the self-hosted build.
• Open source usage billing — AGPL-3.0, full feature parity between self-hosted and managed, Go + Kafka at 60K+ events/sec.
• Built for AI & SaaS — Credits and wallets with rollover and auto top-up, per-model usage tracking, four payment gateways, and an MCP server exposing every API operation to coding agents.

Best for: AI and SaaS teams that need enterprise contract billing and real-time usage metering in one self-hostable system, billing customers across regions.

Self-hosting reality: Go services + a Kafka layer, deployed as containers. That's a real streaming dependency, so plan for someone who knows Kafka. The managed cloud exists for teams that would rather not — with no feature difference.

How These Platforms Compare

2. Lago

Lago is open source billing infrastructure built around event metering and the most widely adopted project in this category. It runs on Ruby at ~15,000 billing events/sec, supports event property filtering to price by model or input type within a single billable metric, and handles prepaid wallets with recurring top-ups and expiry. The community edition is AGPL-3.0 and free to self-host.

Best for: Developer-first teams that want event metering with an established community and are content on the community edition's feature set.

Limitation: The customer portal, role-based access and on-prem deployment sit in Lago Premium (quote-only, no published pricing) — the free tier and the full product aren't the same thing.

Self-hosting reality: Docker-based deployment of a Ruby stack. Well-trodden, though the Ruby engine sets a lower throughput ceiling than the Go and Rust projects here.

3. Kill Bill

Kill Bill is the oldest project in this comparison — an Apache-2.0 subscription billing and payments platform written in Java with 15+ years in production. Used by HP, Rakuten, Groupon and Square, it ships a back-office UI (Kaui) and covers subscriptions, payments, usage metering, wallets, catalog management and tax. Its payment integrations follow a plugin model, and a managed option (Aviate) is priced at a fixed rate rather than a percentage of revenue.

Best for: Enterprises with high subscription volume and heavy customization requirements, particularly on a JVM stack.

Limitation: Architected as a subscription-and-payments platform with usage metering layered on afterwards — not built around real-time event streams the way AI workloads need. No published throughput figure.

Self-hosting reality: The heaviest operational commitment on this list. A JVM application server + database, and the extensibility that makes it powerful also makes the initial configuration substantial.

4. OpenMeter

OpenMeter is an Apache-2.0 metering and billing engine written in Go, using Kafka and ksqlDB for stream processing and the CloudEvents standard for ingestion. It handles flexible aggregations (sum, count, average, min, max), usage limits with real-time balance tracking, and tiered or graduated pricing with an automated invoice lifecycle.

Best for: Teams that want a clean metering layer and intend to build (or already own) the surrounding billing operations.

Limitation: It's a metering engine first — dunning, accounts receivable, CRM sync and enterprise contract structures are either thin or absent.

Self-hosting reality: Similar shape to Flexprice (Go + Kafka), but a smaller surface area to operate because it does less.

5. Meteroid

Meteroid is an AGPL-3.0 pricing and billing platform written in Rust, aimed at product-led SaaS. It covers subscription management, invoicing, usage metering, cost limiting, grandfathering, pricing experiments and revenue analytics, and self-hosting is documented through Docker Compose and a Helm chart.

Best for: Teams that want a modern Rust codebase and are comfortable tracking a project before it reaches a stable release.

Limitation: The repository is labelled Experimental and the latest release is a release candidate — hard to justify for production billing today.

Self-hosting reality: Docker Compose for local work and Helm for clusters, with no managed option.

What Does Self-Hosting Actually Cost You?

Self-hosting removes the licence fee and replaces it with operating cost — and almost nobody in this category quantifies the swap.

The infrastructure is the visible part and usually the smaller one. A metering engine needs compute, a datastore, and in most cases a streaming layer. Flexprice and OpenMeter both depend on Kafka, Kill Bill needs a JVM application server, Lago and Meteroid ship container setups. None of that is exotic, and none of it is free.

The real cost is ownership. Billing fails loudly — at month end, in front of customers — and a billing stack with no named owner becomes an incident waiting for a quarter-end. Budget for someone who knows the streaming layer and will handle upgrades, not a shared side responsibility.

Then there's the cost that surprises teams: discovering mid-implementation that the free tier doesn't include the thing you assumed. A customer portal, role-based access, or on-prem deployment sitting behind a commercial plan turns a self-hosting decision into a procurement conversation you'd planned to avoid. That's the single most useful question to answer before writing any integration code.

The Bottom Line

Three questions settle this choice, and most teams already know their answers:

1. Does the free tier need to be the whole product, or is a paid plan for the portal and access control acceptable?
2. Does billing data have to stay inside your own infrastructure for compliance reasons?
3. Do you bill customers outside the US, where gateway coverage stops being a detail and starts being the constraint?

Whichever way those land, run one test before you integrate: take a customer who has a recurring plan, a mid-cycle change, and metered overage, and model that on a local deployment through to a generated invoice. The projects built for this decade produce one correct invoice. The ones that bolted metering onto a subscription engine produce two line items and a reconciliation problem.

FAQ

Is open source billing software actually free to run in production?

Self-hosting removes the licence fee, not the operating cost. You still pay for compute, the datastore, the streaming layer, and the engineering time to patch and upgrade. Budget for a named owner — billing breaks loudly. The bigger cost trap isn't infrastructure; it's discovering the free tier omits the customer portal or RBAC, and closing the gap means moving to a paid plan.

Should you build billing in-house or adopt an open source platform?

Build in-house only when billing is a differentiator for your product — which for most teams it isn't. The parts that look simple are event ingestion and invoice generation; the parts that consume quarters are idempotency on retries, late-arriving events, proration, credit rollover, tax, and multi-currency. Adopting open source gives you the code, so you keep the ability to extend or fork without the initial build cost.

Which open source billing platforms support on-prem deployment for compliance?

Flexprice, Kill Bill, OpenMeter and Meteroid can all run inside your own infrastructure at no licence cost. Lago supports on-prem through Lago Premium (its paid tier), not the free community edition. If data residency is a hard requirement, confirm whether on-prem sits in the free tier or behind a commercial plan before you commit.