Hi, your docs say that users don't need state syncing, but when using Stripe you do need state syncing or to ingest the Stripe events. I also don't see any information in the docs about handling e.g. chargebacks or other events and listening for (or otherwise syncing against the history of) those events. I'm a little confused - why would I want to not have that? I could be misunderstanding this project though!
Ah yes, we're still entirely built on Stripe, so all your chargeback management, tax handling, subscriptions and payments are still handled by them! We are not a Stripe replacement.
When our users integrate Autumn, they don't need to handle the state syncing or any Stripe events, as we do all of that for them.
Eg, one of your users, John, subscribes to a Pro tier. We'll listen to that event from Stripe, and grant them access to the right features (eg premium analytics and 100 messages).
From your app, you just query Autumn to ask "does John have access to send messages?", and Autumn says "yes".
When the John's payment fails, we again handle that event from Stripe. Now when your app asks whether John has messages, Autumn says "no, their payment failed".
When you log into Stripe, you can still see everything as normal, and take actions as you normally would!
Edit: now that I'm writing this comment, I realize that we probably should be listening to the chargeback event so we can block access to features if that happens. We'll definitely handle this case, it's just that no one has needed it so far...
Huh, weird. I don't think I have ever wanted to login to Stripe and take manual actions. Usually I hook up Stripe events to actions in my applications, like "The user subscribed, wire them up to the drip lifecycle" or "The user unsubscribed, remove them from a certain marketing list and try to schedule an exit interview" or other hook-ups.
Ah yes. Interestingly most of our users don't set this up in the early stage. But for the ones that do, they need webhooks for this. We have a single webhook that fires whenever a customer's state is updated (eg subscription started, cancelled, downgraded, expired) etc, that the downstream functions you talk about rely on.
People compare us a lot because they're also another open source YC company that does billing. So definitely some similarities!
I think in practise though we serve a very different segment. Lago is great for high-throughput event metering and mainly target series B+ companies. They don't yet have an offering for feature permissions management (aka entitlements).
Autumn is built more for early stage companies that have payments in-app. Hence we're trying to invest more in the developer experience (eg React hooks), while also providing that abstraction layer for entitlements too.
We absolutely will be adding more payment providers soon. Our biggest requests are Polar and Razorpay for the indian market.
You say but your landing page almost lists similar features that getlago does including things like "metering" etc. It is ok to be similar of course but I don't really see how you are different than them other than saying that they are focussed on Series B and you are for early stage. So feature wise, I am not seeing a huge difference. I could be wrong of course.
I think that's a fault of ours with our landing page and messaging. We can definitely do a better job here. Almost everyone that has used us after using Lago can tell a big difference with the products.
The main reason that people use us is permissions management. We are the source of truth for which of your users can access what, and linking that to billing. Eg, we know that because user ABC is on Pro tier and bought 3 top ups, they have access to 75 AI credits. If their next payment fails, they should only have access to 15 AI credits (etc etc). Our value is in handling this matrix of scenarios related to usage resets, billing cycles, transitioning between monthly and yearly plans, etc.
Lago only handles billing, so if you're using them, then the logic to sync up the user's permissions with the billing state has to be handled yourself.
Supporting multiple payment providers would be crucial for true payment infrastructure independence - curious if there's a plugin architecture planned that would make it easier to add adapters for Adyen, PayPal, or regional payment gateways.
This is absolutely where we want to end up within the next year, especially as we move upmarket. Enterprises love having redundancy between payment providers to use as leverage for lower fees and there are several companies founded purely around payment routing, (deciding which payment provider has the best acceptance rate based on region, issuing bank, MCC etc). Some examples are primer and payrails.
It just turns out that most of our users are only really interested in using Stripe at the early stage, so for now our codebase is closely embedded into their billing product.
It's going to be fun(?) ripping all of it out and moving towards a PSP agnostic architecture you mentioned.
One more data point: at work we use Stripe for most regions [1], but in our largest region (South Africa) we have to use Paystack [2] (a Stripe subsidiary). The API isn't 1:1 compatible and there's no plans to do so in the near future. Having multiple providers is a must for us to consider a solution.
Lago is better in that they have have support for custom payment integrations [3].
love this as someone who's been fixing the same billing bugs over and over and who sometimes finds stripe more complex than it should be. will make sure to try this on my next adventure.
btw, if you still want to go directly with stripe, here are some general recommendations/notes I generally agree with:
Thank you! We try and take case of most of these bugs and edge cases. I think the ones that have been most useful are:
1. Race conditions. There are some weird conditions to handle around if a user makes it back to your app post-payment before the webhook, or if they click twice on a purchase button accidentally.
2. Keeping usage reset cycles in sync with billing cycles. We had a bunch of weird cases to solve in February as it's a shorter month.
3. Handling annual plans that have monthly usage billing cycles. Or just handling anything to do with transitioning between annual and yearly billing.
Theo's approach is awesome and a very similar architecture to what we have.
From what I could gather from quick look this seems to targeted towards B2C applications, i.e. 1 customer has 1 user. In B2B cases there is often cases with "customer has entitlement to feature X, but only users A & B can use it, C cannot" (and in some cases users have access to multiple customers). Are you planning on adding this kind of support and are you planning on handling the role/user mapping yourself or just providing some integration points?
(just to be clear, not relevant in my case at this point, just something that was a bit messy to handle in something I worked with previously)
Yes! This actually extends beyond the concept of users. Eg people have similar problems when provisioning different access levels to different workspaces, or different compute instances. We use a concept called “entities” to handle this, where each entity is a sub account that lives under a customer. Each entity can they have its own set of features, meters and even subscriptions.
Connecting this all to auth systems is still a flow we’re hoping to make cleaner. It’s in early stages for now.
Nice to see this show HN, I was literally talking to a friend yesterday about how Autumn is making their billing way easier.
I've suffered so much with all the pricing changes I've been experimenting with (early stage solo founder). Till now had been chugging along doing it manually but I'm going to integrate autumn soon.
Hey! Yes it will, as long as you can process the payment with Stripe, you can use us. I know Stripe has discounts for non-profits.
However, Autumn is really only useful when combined with our permissions / entitlement management. So if your donors get access to certain things once they donate, then it would make sense to use us!
Updating credit card:
- We have an openBillingPortal() function that when called, will redirect a user to the Stripe billing portal where they can update their card info. If it's a valid card, we allow the change and keep the customer in an active subscription state.
Past invoices:
- We have a GET /customer method that returns all billing related information on a user. This includes their current plans, features and balances they have available, and can take in an expand?=invoices param that will return all past invoice data for you to display.
Users can also see invoice history in the Stripe billing portal mentioned above.
What's the plan for monetization? Your license is Apache 2.0, which I'm not sure makes sense from having customers pay.
In contrast, Lago uses AGPL-3.0 and has an open-core model (not sure if the premium features are source available or not), which makes it more clearer on how they're going to make money.
We have a cloud version that we charge a flat fee for, and I think there’s enough people that don’t want to deal with self hosting for it to make sense. When we started out we just used the same licence as some other dev tools (like supabase).
this is interesting and i've been poking at autumn for a little bit. and nice to see more billing in the oss. we started on a self hosted billing solution, but quickly realized that a single centralized (hosted) model was better for our particular use case (less to manage). curious if you're seeing the oss as a driver for trust or if folks are demanding this for some reason?
also a fan of a single state for billing, metering, and entitlements. any plans for a go sdk for these?
Thanks! Going oss was definitely about trust in the beginning -- people were more open to using the platform because they could see our codebase
Agreed that self-hosting billing can be a pain just cuz of how complex the whole system can be, which also means that it's prob p hard to debug / fix when something goes wrong. We don't see a lot of people self-hosting Autumn at the moment, but would be interesting to see that happen.
We've got a bunch of requests for a go sdk, so definitely on our roadmap to launch that soon!
DX is our bread and butter though, and we're fully focused on perfecting it for a single language (Typescript) before we start journeying into other languages!
We are pretty tightly coupled with Auth. Part of setting it up is resolving your internal customer (or org) ID from your auth JWT and passing it into an autumnHandler function, which then makes calls to the Autumn API.
This means you don't need to store any additional IDs for billing -- just make calls to Autumn with your exiting auth uuids.
Appreciate the kind words. We have a long way to go before it's a solved problem, but making headway for early stage companies with typical SaaS pricing :)
I have some web/mobile apps and I'm currently using Adapty which has custom paywalls and other sorts of features, as well as web-based paywalls now that Apple lost their ruling against Epic Games (and I'm using Flutter but the UI side doesn't necessarily matter due to the web-based nature of the paywalls). Is this a use case you are targeting? Adapty also integrates with Stripe for the web side of its offerings.
I think the offering is similar -- both manage entitlements and paywalls. And while we do have a proportion of users that use us for mobile apps we're pretty focused on SaaS / web.
I can imagine Adapty would go deeper on features like AB testing, paywall designing etc
Our users handle lower volume of subscriptions but require more flexibility and depth on the pricing models they want to support.
Yep a RevenueCat competitor essentially. Makes sense to focus on web, seems like it's using pure TypeScript, is it mainly for the backend, or for the frontend?
We have react hooks so we try and make the majority of the integration lift on the frontend. One of our contributors is helping us launch a python SDK soon too !
When our users integrate Autumn, they don't need to handle the state syncing or any Stripe events, as we do all of that for them.
Eg, one of your users, John, subscribes to a Pro tier. We'll listen to that event from Stripe, and grant them access to the right features (eg premium analytics and 100 messages).
From your app, you just query Autumn to ask "does John have access to send messages?", and Autumn says "yes".
When the John's payment fails, we again handle that event from Stripe. Now when your app asks whether John has messages, Autumn says "no, their payment failed".
When you log into Stripe, you can still see everything as normal, and take actions as you normally would!
Edit: now that I'm writing this comment, I realize that we probably should be listening to the chargeback event so we can block access to features if that happens. We'll definitely handle this case, it's just that no one has needed it so far...
Are you planning on adding other payment providers besides Stripe?
I think in practise though we serve a very different segment. Lago is great for high-throughput event metering and mainly target series B+ companies. They don't yet have an offering for feature permissions management (aka entitlements).
Autumn is built more for early stage companies that have payments in-app. Hence we're trying to invest more in the developer experience (eg React hooks), while also providing that abstraction layer for entitlements too.
We absolutely will be adding more payment providers soon. Our biggest requests are Polar and Razorpay for the indian market.
The main reason that people use us is permissions management. We are the source of truth for which of your users can access what, and linking that to billing. Eg, we know that because user ABC is on Pro tier and bought 3 top ups, they have access to 75 AI credits. If their next payment fails, they should only have access to 15 AI credits (etc etc). Our value is in handling this matrix of scenarios related to usage resets, billing cycles, transitioning between monthly and yearly plans, etc.
Lago only handles billing, so if you're using them, then the logic to sync up the user's permissions with the billing state has to be handled yourself.
It just turns out that most of our users are only really interested in using Stripe at the early stage, so for now our codebase is closely embedded into their billing product.
It's going to be fun(?) ripping all of it out and moving towards a PSP agnostic architecture you mentioned.
Lago is better in that they have have support for custom payment integrations [3].
[1] https://stripe.com/global
[2] https://paystack.com/stripe/south-africa
[3] https://getlago.com/docs/integrations/payments/custom-paymen...
btw, if you still want to go directly with stripe, here are some general recommendations/notes I generally agree with:
https://github.com/t3dotgg/stripe-recommendations
1. Race conditions. There are some weird conditions to handle around if a user makes it back to your app post-payment before the webhook, or if they click twice on a purchase button accidentally.
2. Keeping usage reset cycles in sync with billing cycles. We had a bunch of weird cases to solve in February as it's a shorter month.
3. Handling annual plans that have monthly usage billing cycles. Or just handling anything to do with transitioning between annual and yearly billing.
Theo's approach is awesome and a very similar architecture to what we have.
(just to be clear, not relevant in my case at this point, just something that was a bit messy to handle in something I worked with previously)
Connecting this all to auth systems is still a flow we’re hoping to make cleaner. It’s in early stages for now.
I've suffered so much with all the pricing changes I've been experimenting with (early stage solo founder). Till now had been chugging along doing it manually but I'm going to integrate autumn soon.
However, Autumn is really only useful when combined with our permissions / entitlement management. So if your donors get access to certain things once they donate, then it would make sense to use us!
Any insight into why they failed and why you will be different?
Past invoices: - We have a GET /customer method that returns all billing related information on a user. This includes their current plans, features and balances they have available, and can take in an expand?=invoices param that will return all past invoice data for you to display.
Users can also see invoice history in the Stripe billing portal mentioned above.
In contrast, Lago uses AGPL-3.0 and has an open-core model (not sure if the premium features are source available or not), which makes it more clearer on how they're going to make money.
few builders i know struggling with this. will share this with them.
also a fan of a single state for billing, metering, and entitlements. any plans for a go sdk for these?
Agreed that self-hosting billing can be a pain just cuz of how complex the whole system can be, which also means that it's prob p hard to debug / fix when something goes wrong. We don't see a lot of people self-hosting Autumn at the moment, but would be interesting to see that happen.
We've got a bunch of requests for a go sdk, so definitely on our roadmap to launch that soon!
DX is our bread and butter though, and we're fully focused on perfecting it for a single language (Typescript) before we start journeying into other languages!
This means you don't need to store any additional IDs for billing -- just make calls to Autumn with your exiting auth uuids.
Our bottleneck is probably infra + optimisations via caching but at the moment I'd say we can handle 1k events per second comfortably :)
I think the offering is similar -- both manage entitlements and paywalls. And while we do have a proportion of users that use us for mobile apps we're pretty focused on SaaS / web.
I can imagine Adapty would go deeper on features like AB testing, paywall designing etc
Our users handle lower volume of subscriptions but require more flexibility and depth on the pricing models they want to support.