Criticism that 'Stripe is extracting more money from companies by holding various financial data hostage by deliberately not providing some APIs'
Antho Truong, co-founder of
Stripe Data vs Open‐Source Alternatives: a MRR example · getlago/lago Wiki · GitHub
https://github.com/getlago/lago/wiki/Stripe-Data-vs-Open%E2%80%90Source-Alternatives:-a-MRR-example
MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) is sales that occur repeatedly every month, and is an important indicator for measuring the degree of growth in subscription-based services. Stripe's dashboard displays MRR and indicators of MRR growth in an easily visible location, showing that Stripe also understands the importance of MRR.
When a company analyzes its own financial results, it is common to obtain these various indicators through an API. However, Stripe's API only provides the bare minimum, so it is not possible to obtain MRR in one go. Truong said, 'Stripe has one of the best engineering teams in the world, and we purposely do not provide an API in order to maximize profits.'
Truong further criticized, 'Users have to pay extra to use Stripe Sigma or Stripe Data Pipeline to access more data, but this is a bit ridiculous considering that Stripe's base fee is higher than that of its payment service competitors PayPal and Square. We created Lago as an open source billing management system to solve these problems.'
Lago is a system that can manage subscription and usage-based billing, and by using Lago, you can know 'who to charge and how much to charge.' Unlike Stripe, you need to use a separate service for payments, but on the other hand, it can be integrated with any payment service provider, which has the advantage of not causing vendor lock-in.
Since Lago owns all of its data, it can freely import data from the Postgres database into open source analysis tools such as Metabase for analysis, allowing it to calculate important metrics such as MRR without any restrictions.
'As closed-source companies grow, they tend to reduce basic functionality in order to get users to pay more,' said Truong, emphasizing the benefits of using billing management tools, saying, 'Companies shouldn't be held hostage by their financial data.'
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in Software, Web Service, Posted by log1d_ts