[HN Gopher] Show HN: Lotus - Open source pricing and packaging i...
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Show HN: Lotus - Open source pricing and packaging infrastructure
Hi HN! We're building an open-source pricing & packaging engine for
SaaS with a built-in billing system.
(https://github.com/uselotus/lotus). We strongly believe pricing
is the largest untapped growth lever for SaaS, primarily because
pricing affects so many critical systems that don't talk to each
other (billing, payments, feature limits, metering, and CRM). We're
building this infrastructure to fix this and enable quick
experimentation. Lotus acts as a central repository for all of
your pricing plans and utilizes your payment gateway, to manage
usage-based, per-seat, and custom enterprise pricing. We're excited
to open-source this because we want to enable developers to build
their custom pricing and integration edge cases on top of this
base. We've launched this repo under an MIT license so any
developer can use the tool. Give it a spin for us at either: *
test our cloud version at (https://demo.uselotus.io) * self-host
here (https://github.com/uselotus/lotus) and let us know what you
think. All feedback is appreciated! If the project is especially
relevant to you, follow us and we'll keep you updated when we've
fully published all our beta features.
Author : mikaeln
Score : 62 points
Date : 2022-11-06 16:30 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| ssarodia wrote:
| Love to see Lotus out there and excited to see where this goes
| next!
| mikaeln wrote:
| Thanks! Excited to keep building!
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| Is this basically a stripe alternative?
| mikaeln wrote:
| Not quite. Lotus doesn't facilitate payments. Our job ends
| after we calculate the invoice a customer owes. We integrate
| with Stripe (working on Bill.com integration) so you can change
| customers through their payment gateway.
|
| Lotus offers metering, a simpler frontend to iterate on plans,
| pricing experiments, and actual feature entitlements in our
| plans so that both the price and the features in a plan live in
| the same place. Stripe doesn't offer these components.
| greatgib wrote:
| Hi, on the github page/readme , the docs link is broken.
|
| Also, on smartphone, the demo login page content is broken...
| cpursley wrote:
| Neat idea but the main font on the landing page is making my eyes
| bleed (seriously difficult to parse).
| mikaeln wrote:
| Yeah, whoever put that font in there was crazy (me lol). But
| noted, thanks!
| underyx wrote:
| Did you actually pay for the commercial license of the
| Quantify font? Interesting choice to spend a company's first
| dollars :D
|
| Anyway, I do like the color scheme (I assume) referencing
| Lotus F1 team.
| mikaeln wrote:
| We paid of course (would be a bad look if we didn't being
| an open source company). Worth the small cost for an
| opinionated look.
| sqs wrote:
| Looks potentially interesting to us at Sourcegraph. We built
| pricing, metering, and license keys into our product ourselves a
| few years ago because (1) nothing like this existed at the time
| and (2) a large portion of our customer base was (and still is)
| self-hosted, so we couldn't depend on some cloud service. Our
| code is all public, in case you want to poke around and see if
| it'd be a good solution for us.
| mikaeln wrote:
| Definitely think Lotus might be useful to you, especially since
| you can self-host. Just took a quick look into your repo, but
| will do a deeper dive a bit later.
|
| The nice thing is that we've built Lotus so that you can plug
| in the components you want, for example, you could plug in your
| custom metering into our pricing/plan management system.
|
| We are still pretty early so we have had the ability to help
| migrate custom systems over to Lotus and figure out the most
| cost-effective solution. Will follow up on email!
| oslo wrote:
| In 2022, managing different pricing options for Saas is still an
| awful experience - good to see someone trying to fix this.
| mfkp wrote:
| Lol that mobile registration demo page: https://imgur.io/4T21QYQ
| mikaeln wrote:
| Definitely not built for mobile... with that said, also hiring
| frontend engs xD
| joshmanders wrote:
| > with that said, also hiring frontend engs xD
|
| Hit me up, I'm open to freelancing. Here's my Who's
| Freelancing thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33423893
| Lio wrote:
| I'd love to know the story behind getting the rights to the Lotus
| name, did you licence it from HCL or IBM?
| Bauernfeind wrote:
| Nice! Will have a look into it! What's the difference to Lago?
| (https://www.getlago.com/)
| canadiantim wrote:
| I would be very interested to know how Lotus compares to Lago
| too. I'm just about to start using something like this and was
| leaning towards Lago but was also considering killbill.
|
| That being said, Lotus seems even more ideally suited for me
| (also a Postgres/Django app so kudos for that stack!).
|
| The main thing I want is ability to centralize all subscription
| management despite customers potentially using different
| payment processors (eg stripe vs PayPal or crypto). It
| certainly looks like Lotus does this as well. I guess I'll dive
| in to see how difficult it might be to add a custom payment
| processor (eg crypto payments), but I definitely think I'm
| leaning more towards using Lotus now. Thanks for making this!
| mikaeln wrote:
| feel free to email me and we can help build the custom
| payment integration you need. mikael [at] uselotus.io
| diegoesc wrote:
| Hey I'm Diego CTO/co-founder at lotus
|
| We actually tried to build our payment processing
| infrastructure in a pretty modular way to make it super quick
| to integrate new processors. You can take a look at the
| extensibility guide here:
| https://docs.uselotus.io/docs/extensibility/integrate-
| paymen...
|
| We'll be working on adding more options in the next weeks,
| but in the meantime if you need it ASAP we're happy to work
| with you to make it happen :)
| mikaeln wrote:
| I see one key difference in that we are focusing on
| pricing+packaging as a combined problem. We include the ability
| to add feature entitlements and usage limits in your plans and
| then programmatically check whether a customer has access to
| something based on the plan they are currently on. This
| augments your existing authorization system. It is a different
| approach than what Lago looks like they are going for and they
| don't support this now.
|
| We also operate under an MIT license vs AGPL it looks like. So
| our business models may differ in the future. Looks like they
| definitely have some features we don't cover yet as well. Seems
| like a great project!
| rgbrgb wrote:
| This looks great, congrats on the launch. Weirdly I've seen
| probably 5 of these pricing as a service layers this week (and a
| few open source). Is it because I'm thinking about pricing for my
| own product or is there some powerful "why now" that I'm missing?
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