How Hardcount compares

An open-source alternative to Stripe Billing and Lago for usage-based and AI billing. It runs on your own servers and uses Stripe to charge the card.

Hardcount is pre-1.0 and has no production users yet. Stripe Billing and the four projects below are in production use at other companies. Weigh everything here with that in mind.

Checked on 2026-10-31, except where a source gives an earlier date. Projects change: re-check any point you plan to rely on. Each project’s sources are under its card.

Side by side

Question	Hardcount	Stripe Billing	Lago	OpenMeter	Flexprice	Kill Bill
Licence	MIT, one edition	Closed source, hosted	AGPL-3.0; premium features need a licence key	Apache-2.0	AGPL-3.0 at the root; the core services need an Enterprise licence in production	Apache-2.0; the Aviate plugin is commercial
Payment providers	Stripe, cards only	Stripe, with the payment methods your account allows	Stripe, GoCardless, Cashfree, Adyen, Moneyhash	Stripe, through Stripe Invoicing	Stripe, Razorpay, Nomod, Moyasar, Paddle, Whop, Chargebee	Plugins for Adyen, Braintree, Qualpay, Stripe, Hyperswitch
A price per model and token type on one meter	Yes	Not in basic usage billing; Stripe points you to Metronome	Yes, with charge filters	One filtered feature per combination¹	One filtered feature per combination	No labels on usage; one unit type per combination¹
Failed-payment retries	Included	Included (Smart Retries)	A premium add-on, on request	None of its own; Stripe Invoicing collects	No schedule found; a manual retry per invoice	Included, with overdue states
Test clock	One for each test customer	Yes, in sandboxes, up to three customers a clock	None found	None; an endpoint simulates an invoice	None found	One for the whole server, in test mode
Services to run	5 in the Compose file	None: hosted	8, one of them a one-off migration	11, “not a production topology”	9 by default	3

¹ Our reading of the project’s API spec; its docs do not say it. “None found” means a search of the project’s source and docs found nothing. Hardcount’s column: AI pricing, payment failure handling, its Compose file (Postgres, Redis, Hardcount, the dashboard and nginx).

Stripe Billing

Ahead on: hosted, with nothing to run

Stripe Billing is a hosted service, so there is no server to run. Simple per-seat pricing paid by card is a job it already does well.

Its pay-as-you-go plan takes 0.7% of what you bill. Its basic usage-based billing has no dimensional pricing (one meter with a different rate for each model and token type); Stripe’s docs point you to Metronome for that. Metronome is now part of Stripe.

Hardcount does the billing itself, and uses Stripe to charge the card, and to work out tax if you turn on Stripe Tax. There is no guide for moving from Stripe Billing yet.

Sources

Lago

Ahead on: more payment providers and methods

Lago takes payments through Stripe, GoCardless, Cashfree, Adyen and Moneyhash; its code also supports Flutterwave. Through Stripe it also takes bank debits such as SEPA, ACH and BACS.

It prices by event properties too, with charge filters. It lists 8 SDKs; the Java and C# ones are archived.

Its licence is AGPL-3.0. A licence key unlocks premium features such as invoice preview and recurring wallet top-ups; automatic retries of failed payments are a premium add-on, on request. There is no guide for moving from Lago yet.

Sources

OpenMeter

Ahead on: the payment methods your Stripe account allows

OpenMeter is now part of Kong, and stays Apache-2.0.

With its Stripe app, OpenMeter collects through Stripe Invoicing, so an invoice uses the customer’s default payment method or the methods allowed by your Stripe invoice settings. Stripe’s Invoicing fee applies.

It has SDKs for JavaScript, Python and Go, all pre-release, and an endpoint that simulates an invoice.

The open-source version has no operator UI, and its Compose file runs 11 services, described as “not a production topology”.

Sources

Flexprice

Ahead on: more payment gateways, and wallets with auto top-up

Flexprice connects to Stripe, Razorpay, Nomod, Moyasar, Paddle, Whop and Chargebee. With Chargebee, it sends invoices there and Chargebee collects the payment.

Its wallets have prepaid and promotional credits, auto top-up, expiry and a real-time balance. It has SDKs for Go, Python and TypeScript, and previews subscription changes.

Its root licence is AGPL-3.0, but the services that ingest events, make invoices and run wallets are under a licence that allows production use only with a Flexprice Enterprise licence.

Sources

Kill Bill

Ahead on: the fewest services, and many payment plugins

Kill Bill’s Compose file runs 3 services. It has plugins for Adyen, Braintree, Qualpay, Stripe and Hyperswitch, and clients in Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, Node and Go.

It includes failed-payment retries with overdue states, and a dry run that previews subscription changes.

Its licence is Apache-2.0. The open-source core takes usage summaries per subscription through its API, and its docs ask for one summary per subscription per day; a commercial plugin, Aviate, adds raw-event metering, wallets and coupons.

Sources

Not compared here: Orb, Metronome (now part of Stripe) and Chargebee are hosted services that charge a share of what you bill, about 0.6–0.8% on their published plans. Sources: Orb pricing, Metronome pricing, Chargebee pricing.

Where Hardcount differs

One MIT licence, and every feature is in it.
A test clock for each test customer, on your normal install.
On most API requests, Postgres row-level security keeps accounts apart, on top of the application code.
Failed-payment retries are included. Kill Bill includes them too.
Webhooks are signed, with a timestamp, without running another service.
The throughput figure comes with its hardware and method: How it scales.

Where another project is ahead

Payment providers: Hardcount supports Stripe cards only.
SDKs: Hardcount has none yet.
Invoice preview: Hardcount’s leaves out tax and credits.
Fewest services: Kill Bill’s Compose file has three. Hardcount’s has five, including a front proxy (nginx, the web server that takes each request first and passes it on) that the others’ files don’t have.
Previewing a plan change: Flexprice and Kill Bill both do it, and Lago does with a premium licence.

Try it on your computer

Start Hardcount in test mode and run its demo. Found something rough? Open an issue or a Discussion.

Run it locally Talk to the maintainer