KillBill – Open-Source Subscription Billing and Payment Platform
NICE. I've been looking for something like this for a while. The problem with subscription startups like chargebee, recurly, etc. is vendor lockin. Why lock the most fundamental part of your business into an unproven startup? That's a hard bargain to drive, even if the charts are really pretty.<p>There's no reason that Chargebee, Recurly could not be emulated in open source software. The solution to the saas problem is simply a nice API + dashboard, with pluggable billing backends. You should be able to swap merchant accounts seamlessly, since that's the biggest point of failure.<p>What would be nice is a "launch KillBill on digitalocean" button (I think someone posted a Show HN like this recently?) so that you could launch your own service and start using it immediately.<p>More generally, I think a lot of SaaS startups are ripe for disruption from open source projects. However, many projects miss the mark of usability. What people need is a self-hosted, open source API that's as usable as chargebee or recurly, for instance. This means that OSS should be targeting microservice architectures more often, instead of self contained solutions with a bunch of wiring required. I want to see more OSS projects that are structured as a standalone app server with an API and dashboard, so that you can self-host but still get the benefits of a composable API.<p>A good example of an open-source project leveraging "microservice architecture" for self hosted solutions is Seatgeek's AB testing project, sixpack. [0]<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/seatgeek/sixpack" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/seatgeek/sixpack</a>