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.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.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.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.A good example of an open-source project leveraging "microservice architecture" for self hosted solutions is Seatgeek's AB testing project, sixpack. [0][0] https://github.com/seatgeek/sixpack