Show HN: Lotus – Open source pricing and packaging infrastructure

Show HN: Lotus – Open source pricing and packaging infrastructure(github.com)

120 points by mikaeln 3 years ago | 31 comments

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.

rgbrgb 3 years ago |

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?

sfobiab 3 years ago | |

https://tier.run/

https://getlago.com

mikaeln 3 years ago | |

Thanks! Indeed, there are a lot of approaches to this problem. We spent some time refining Lotus so that we focus on creating new solutions rather than competing with others in a similar space. Our approach is pricing&packaging that acts as a no-code app for iteration (but can be customized for new edge cases through code/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?

So many valid answers, but the major ones are the rising popularity of usage-based and hybrid pricing models and more importantly a shift in SaaS from growth = "acquisition" to growth = profitability and expansion in addition to acquisition. The economic shifts are forcing companies to ask how can we capture more of the value that we have created, and a great solution is reconsidering pricing.

rgbrgb 3 years ago | | |

That makes a lot of sense regarding the shift from top of funnel acquisition to conversion. The pricing models we’ve been working on definitely fall in this usage-based framework since we’re trying to bootstrap. Thanks for the perspective and good luck!

sqs 3 years ago |

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 3 years ago | |

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!

Bauernfeind 3 years ago |

Nice! Will have a look into it! What's the difference to Lago? (https://www.getlago.com/)

canadiantim 3 years ago | |

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!

diegoesc 3 years ago | | |

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 3 years ago | | |

feel free to email me and we can help build the custom payment integration you need. mikael [at] uselotus.io

mikaeln 3 years ago | |

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!

Lio 3 years ago |

I'd love to know the story behind getting the rights to the Lotus name, did you licence it from HCL or IBM?

oslo 3 years ago | |

And I'd love to know the story behind getting the rights to the Lio name, did you license it from Lio Holdings LLC: https://uspto.report/TM/90179887

Lio 3 years ago | | |

Sigh Clearly I haven't licenced my username from anyone because I'm not an entity trading in the same market as a very well known pre-existing brand of the same name.

I'm just some anonymous putz asking an honest question in good faith.

Since HCL don't seem to be using the Lotus name right now, it wasn't clear if they actually bought the rights from IBM during the sale of other assets.

It seemed at least plausible that this new venture might have licensed or bought an unused, established name for market recognition.

If that is the case then I think it's a great bit of marketing and I'd like to know more about how they pulled it off.

mikaeln 3 years ago | |

Won't say too much on this just yet, except that we did not pay a large amount for the rights as of now

oslo 3 years ago |

In 2022, managing different pricing options for Saas is still an awful experience - good to see someone trying to fix this.

mfkp 3 years ago |

Lol that mobile registration demo page: https://imgur.io/4T21QYQ

mikaeln 3 years ago | |

Definitely not built for mobile… with that said, also hiring frontend engs xD

joshmanders 3 years ago | | |

> 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

klysm 3 years ago |

I don't know if it's because I'm dyslexic, but I find the font on the homepage of uselotus.io to be completely unreadable.

Mave83 3 years ago |

I clicked on demo with my mobile, got a very unusable login prompt, and decided it's not good enough for me at the moment.

mikaeln 3 years ago | |

Sorry, none of our frontend is built for or meant to be used on mobile yet, so if that was what you were planning on doing then I would agree it isn't quite there yet.

cpursley 3 years ago |

Neat idea but the main font on the landing page is making my eyes bleed (seriously difficult to parse).

mikaeln 3 years ago | |

Yeah, whoever put that font in there was crazy (me lol). But noted, thanks!

underyx 3 years ago | | |

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.

ssarodia 3 years ago |

Love to see Lotus out there and excited to see where this goes next!

mikaeln 3 years ago | |

Thanks! Excited to keep building!

greatgib 3 years ago |

Hi, on the github page/readme , the docs link is broken.

Also, on smartphone, the demo login page content is broken...

jdthedisciple 3 years ago |

Is this basically a stripe alternative?

mikaeln 3 years ago | |

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.