16 ms·
Kill Bill – Open-Source Subscription Billing and Payments Platform
- lakomen 4y agoYet another Repo where I don't know if I own the data or what it really is. Lots of marketing and no substantial information
- marykms 4y agoHi there! I'm one of the tech writers working on the docs - along with the marketing information. ;) We are always looking to improve. Just so I'm clear... do you mean the few paragraphs on the Kill Bill GitHub landing page (https://github.com/killbill https://github.com/killbill)? (There is also a readme on the killbill/killbill repo, which is why I'm asking.) Thanks!
- Whitespace 4y agoSubmitted the github link because I couldn't find it from their marketing site: https://killbill.io/ https://killbill.io/
- Operyl 4y agoI went on a trip to see how hard it would be to fine, and I _sort of_ found it, and it was not obvious. 1. Started at the homepage, clicked "Start Now" at the top right. It lands on a page called /download/. 2. The word download is nowhere to be seen on that page, but, the third box in the row is "On premise", and has a "Select plan" which redirects to https://github.com/sponsors/killbill https://github.com/sponsors/killbill. 3. We land on the Github sponsors page for the org. The repository is listed below. Yeesh, that was a trip of obfuscation.
- zinclozenge 4y agoIt's pretty absurd that the quickest way to find their (and honestly a lot of companies') github is by googling "companyname github".
- jlund-molfese 4y agoIt is hidden in the FAQ too— https://killbill.io/faqs/#faq-item-where-is-the-code https://killbill.io/faqs/#faq-item-where-is-the-code But yeah, not emphasizing their GitHub page is an interesting choice, maybe they figure that their audience isn’t developers? Although many of the reviews are from technical people, so that doesn’t make sense either.
- marykms 4y agoWe have corrected this oversight! Thanks for noticing. It's now under the About menu.
- pipeline_peak 4y agoNormalize open sourcing things companies monetize that aren't really that special. Competition breeds innovation
- diamondage 4y agosurely docusign is another target
- pipeline_peak 4y agoAbsolutely
- onebot 4y agoNice to see stuff like this. But won't use it since built on Java. I try to avoid the JVM as much possible.
- cupofjoakim 4y agoCare to explain why?
- sieabahlpark 4y ago
- password4321 4y agoOracle / licensing edit: IIRC the official Java runtime auto-update happily upgraded to not-even-free-as-in-beer pretty nonchalantly. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28543265 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28543265 (2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20799424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20799424 (2019)
- anotherrandom 4y agoI don't understand this complaint anymore. Hotspot and OpenJDK are all GPL, licensing and Oracle aren't worries at this point
- chrisseaton 4y agoIt's GPL with the 'classpath exception' so that you're even exempt from the GPL the you link. Seems pretty good licensing? Do you prefer even more permissive than that?
- mahmoudimus 4y agoThis is no longer a real reason. It's licensed as GPL with a "classpath exception." That's pretty permissive and this article[0] does a pretty good job of explaining some questions you may have. [0]: https://www.mend.io/resources/blog/top-9-gpl-with-the-classpath-exception-questions-answered/ https://www.mend.io/resources/blog/top-9-gpl-with-the-classp...
- tmpz22 4y agoIs Groupon/HP/Square/etc really using this or is it just a fake marketing page?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- paxys 4y agoIt seems to have been created by ex-Groupon folks, so that one is believable. Not sure about the rest.
- brianm 4y agoIt predates Groupon, was actually started at/around Ning (if anyone remembers them). Groupon hired a bunch of the core folks at the time they decided to adopt it.
- jmacd 4y agoI've met with the founders of the project before. They really don't strike me as the bulls#$ng type of promoters we've all grown jaded over. They love this project and what they do.
- rco8786 4y agoCan confirm that Square uses it internally
- pamonrails 4y agoNo fake marketing :-)
- kingsloi 4y agoInteresting name choice and idea, I may try it out if I can figure out how to run java again. I went with a similar name https://github.com/kingsloi/medical-billkill https://github.com/kingsloi/medical-billkill for an app I'm building to digitise medical bills oh I see it uses docker, noice https://docs.killbill.io/latest/getting_started.html#_docker https://docs.killbill.io/latest/getting_started.html#_docker
- incomingpain 4y agoSay I had an project that produces a file that people will subscribe to get access to said file. Is this what you would use to sell it? Why not say shopify?
- jmacd 4y agoThat really strikes me as a better use case for Square or Gumroad than either Shopify or KillBill.
- thedangler 4y agoAnd shameless plug... sytescope.com lol You can have password protected sections or email digital products after purchase.
- thedangler 4y agoShameless plug -You can use my stuff sytescope.com $20/m CAD
- llanowarelves 4y agoThe usual suspects are SendOwl, FastSpring, Gumroad (not a big fan of the UX to be honest), or some industry-specific marketplace (music albums, graphics templates, 3d models, etc. all have big ones).
- aylons 4y agoI'm sorry I don't have anything further to contribute to the discussion, but this is an amazing name for the project. The double-pun in the logo with the duck is the cherry on the top. Actually, here's a small contribution: I do not work with web apps or nowhere near this kind of development (yeah, I also wonder why I'm a regular at HN), or have a use to the end product, but the name and logo grabbed my attention enough to click the link, see the discussion and read the front page. There's power to clever branding.
- inanutshellus 4y agoIt is a bit perverse, right? A solution called "kill bill" that... creates bills.
- sbrossie 4y agoPerverse is a bit strong :-) To be understood as killing the 'billing problem'...
- inanutshellus 4y agoOne could say it kills problems, or headaches, or anxiety. But what does it create? It creates bills. "Perverse" seems like a pretty good descriptor.
- marykms 4y agoperverse: adjective (of a person or their actions) showing a deliberate and obstinate desire to behave in a way that is unreasonable or unacceptable, often in spite of the consequences. Perhaps "ironic" would be a better word. :-) ironic: adjective, happening in the opposite way to what is expected, and typically causing wry amusement because of this.
- rodelrod 4y agoI've built a (proprietary) telecom billing system with the same name back in 2005. I can't claim that as a particularly brilliant pun since the system we were replacing was called "BillGates" so it was kinda obvious.
- modeless 4y agoMaybe this is a good place to ask. I'm considering trying a subscription model for some client side software I'm developing as as a side project. I think something like this would be overkill for me. For a single developer project, what would be the easy way here? Using something totally managed like Patreon? Would Patreon even be a reasonable choice?
- nickstinemates 4y agoStripe is pretty straightforward if you're taking in USD
- mansilladev 4y agoI typically think of Patreon as a way for content creators to charge folks for "memberships." So, while I think their billing mechanisms may work for you from a mechanical perspective, I'd perhaps look at alternatives for monthly billing for your client side software licensing. As for Killbill being overkill.. I think that running/managing your own payment/subscription service behind the scenes probably isn't something you want to spend your time doing, nor would your customers want you spending your time on. Search google for "SaaS billing" and you'll find plenty of options to choose from.
- modeless 4y agoYeah I know what Patreon is typically used for, but I'm still figuring out what will work best for me. It's possible that positioning myself as a content creator would be OK, with the software mostly free, maybe even open source, but a few paid features unlocked by Patreon. Or something. It's a developer tool and I think developers want everything to be free and open source so it will be tough to monetize.
- dewey 4y agoLook into Paddle or Stripe Checkout. It can be as easy as just dropping in a link if you want to do it half-manual until you have the need for it.
- 4y ago
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoWish i'd known about this before signing up with Recurly and, later Stripe Subscriptions. Now existing subscriptions are locked in and I can't move to other vendors without losing those existing subscriptions.
- kareemm 4y agoStripe used to help you migrate away. Not sure if they still do.
- voiper1 4y agoStripe indeed helped me migrate away to a vendor in a foreign country - they did a one-time encryption of all the raw credit card numbers for my new processor to import. The trouble was finding a processor that actually knew what it meant to import the raw credit card numbers (because stripe wouldn't send it to me). But I found one and it all worked out.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago> But I found one and it all worked out. Who?
- voiper1 4y agoIn Israel, sumit.co.il was able to cooperate with Stripe to import my tokens. (I had to pay for some developer time.)
- btown 4y agoI recommend Spreedly for things like this - having a card vault that's independent of your processor can massively de-risk operations and allow you to dynamically route specific transactions to different gateways to optimize profitability. While I haven't tried an import with them, they do support this workflow: https://docs.spreedly.com/guides/migrating/one-time/ https://docs.spreedly.com/guides/migrating/one-time/
- nwilkens 4y agoAlso pretty interesting, Equinix Metal appears to be using this product: https://feedback.equinixmetal.com/changelog/new-kill-bill-billing-engine-live https://feedback.equinixmetal.com/changelog/new-kill-bill-bi... https://metal.equinix.com/blog/under-the-hood-kill-bill/ https://metal.equinix.com/blog/under-the-hood-kill-bill/
- AngeloAnolin 4y agoThis is the type of project that should gain more traction / support. Good name as well. Catchy!
- paledot 4y agoUntil they're sued for trademark infringement...
- randomswede 4y agoThat'd depend on if they're the same entity as "The Billing Project LLC", that seems to own the "KILL BILL" mark for downloadable software. I hope they are the same.
- halfjoking 4y agoIf this supported tons of payment gateways through their plugin system out of the box then it would be worth considering. But if you go to the page about payment gateways they don't have a listing of 50 integrations you could easily drop in. Instead they basically say you'll probably have to write the integration yourself: https://docs.killbill.io/latest/userguide_payment.html https://docs.killbill.io/latest/userguide_payment.html No thanks - I'll just use a payment processor that has a good API for subscription billing, and a flag on my users table that the subscription is up to date.
- jmacd 4y agoThey do have Stripe, Adyen, CoCardless [1] I do agree this would be something a fully commercial project would/should focus on. https://github.com/orgs/killbill/repositories https://github.com/orgs/killbill/repositories
- pamonrails 4y agoFWIW the very vast majority of our users are integrated with either Adyen, Braintree, or Stripe (all open-source plugins). I know of ~20 integrations with more advanced gateways/processors: these are closed-source plugins, but the overall community wouldn't benefit much from accessing them (e.g. it doesn't make sense for many companies to directly integrate with mastercard APIs).
- leonidasv 4y agoAs a software engineer who focus on developing payments and billing systems, I assure you that gateway integration is by far the easiest part.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dathanb82 4y agoAt a basic level, yeah. It gets hairy when you dive into timeout handling and dealing with errors in reconciliation, across multiple gateways. tl;dr: there is no easy part
- jmacd 4y agoThey have a cloud offering. [1] Which is a good way to check things out without needing to deploy and run Java code. 1: https://cloud.killbill.io https://cloud.killbill.io
- pamonrails 4y agoFYI this is just a managed sandbox, to test things out. We don't offer Kill Bill aaS, as it goes against our value proposition (Kill Bill is a framework to build your own internal subscription billing and payments platform).
- lakomen 4y agoThanks, now I know what it is, why don't you put this piece on top of the repo so everyone visiting know what it is and doesn't waste time with the marketing babble
- ranger_danger 4y agoVery unprofessional name, this is not something I could even bring up in a commercial setting if I wanted to use it. Please consider a different name.
- newone2three 4y agoWhy?
- jjgreen 4y agoIn the UK, "the Bill" is "the old Bill", the police. "Kill the Bill" is a favoured chant by cross anarchists opposing the "Take-Away-You-Freedom bill (2023)", and/or wishing an early demise to the police.
- veb 4y agomy first thought was the movie. but if you think about it, they're talking about killing billing problems so I'd say that's where the name comes from. (if you check out their website). a name that makes people go "hmm that's a bit odd" is actually a very efficient way to get people to remember it next time they need them.
- jjgreen 4y agoThat's true enough ... hmmm ... [searches web to see if anyone is making "CopKilla soda"]
- jonahbenton 4y agoMet with this team probably 8 years ago for consideration on a (at the time) large subscription product. Didn't go with it because of issues in the organization I was working with, but KillBill folks were good people, impressive, good product. Glad to see them still around.
- AzzieElbab 4y agoTried to adopt it about 8 years ago but their very traditional architecture didn’t fit well with the infra we were using. Also some jruby based plugins were buggy
- pamonrails 4y agoFair. That being said, we've come a long way by now. Lots of our users deploy Kill Bill in "cloud-native" environments these days (e.g. k8s). Also, we've deprecated JRuby support. Plugins are either written in Java or in other languages through grpc shims (e.g. Go).
- AzzieElbab 4y agoGreat to see you guys take all the things into account.
- adave 4y agoYou mean the flawed microservices architecture where everything is so complicated it's almost not worth doing.
- AzzieElbab 4y agoMy memory could be wrong I think the issues we had were related to KB callback based apis becoming flaky with our in-house service mesh and proxied dynamic ips. Again, that was such a long time ago, k8 was fresh and exotic back then
- sdfhbdf 4y agoIt’s interesting to see that even though the project seems to boast being about 10 years old it still doesn’t have 1.0 version. For some this might not be important but it does seem to subtly convey a message of instability of the product. I haven’t read much into it but have to wonder what is stopping them from releasing a “stable” 1.0
- dvt 4y agoI mean this only makes sense in a world where everyone uses semantic versioning (and the project doesn't seem to indicate this anywhere). Versioning numbers, per se, don't really have any bearing on application stability.
- mccorrinall 4y agoEven when using semver it just means that there were never any major breaking changes. React is also still 0.x :)
- dvt 4y agoInterestingly, being `0.y.z` as a major released version (e.g. not in development or a release candidate) does seem to break semver[1], but I do realize it's more of a guideline and no one really cares: > Major version X (X.y.z | X > 0) MUST be incremented if any backwards incompatible changes are introduced to the public API. It MAY also include minor and patch level changes. Patch and minor versions MUST be reset to 0 when major version is incremented. [1] https://semver.org/ https://semver.org/
- bitdivision 4y agoFor versions < 1.0.0 this does not apply: > Major version zero (0.y.z) is for initial development. Anything MAY change at any time. The public API SHOULD NOT be considered stable.
- riquito 4y ago> React is also still 0.x :) It moved away from 0.x around 6 years ago
- mpaepper 4y agoIf you use this in combination with Stripe, then what do you gain in addition to Stripe?
- paulryanrogers 4y agoOne would hope you'd be decoupled from their rebilling, and therefore could swap vendors more easily. I actually just ran into the need to bypass Stripe rebill recently. Ultimately a workaround was found, yet sometimes you really just need more control.
- pamonrails 4y agoIt really depends on your usecase, but some benefits: * Lower cost (just pay for payment processing, not the subscription features) * Ability to integrate with multiple gateways (to lower cost, support more payment instruments, higher resiliency, etc.) * More advanced subscription features * Ability to customize the system through custom code (plugins) * Data ownership (easier to run analytics reports, since you own the subscription data)
- javier2 4y agoThis sounds like a awesome idea and a great project, and I work with subscription billing. Attempted to try it out for a while, and my first impression is that the UI is terribly ugly, even as I literally could find only 3 buttons to click a side from the Log out button.
- manv1 4y agoWe're hunting for a subscription product, but our use case means that we may have to do a few hundred thousand provisioning checks in a few seconds. Not a lot of products can do this, which means we're going to use redis (or it's ilk) as a cache for subscription information. However, there doesn't seem to be a supported way to subscribe to changes to subscriptions. Is that a roadmap feature or is something that "we should do ourselves?"
- jmacd 4y agoI would love to speak with you to learn more. This is a very good use case for something I have been working on. My email is in my bio page if you are interested.
- frankjr 4y ago> Does Kill Bill support taxes? > Kill Bill does not support taxes. Instead, we partner with Avalara to outsource tax compliance. Our AvaTax connector provides real-time and on-demand calculationsto prevent overcharging or undercharging tax. I expected as much. Handling taxes internationally is a major PITA and it changes all the time as politicians get new ideas how to make things even more complicated. I'm pretty sure that many SaaS companies are unknowingly not compliant with all the rules.
- lazide 4y agoOr as often, knowingly not compliant with the unknown, and unknowable (at their scale) rules
- theturtletalks 4y agoSo you’re saying we need an open-source Avalara alternative. Countries could even send PRs to change tax rates on the fly.
- saddist0 4y agoIt is much more than paying taxes. There is no standard API to pay taxes even if you can calculate the amount. A lot of countries require weird registrations on weird portals upon crossing different thresholds. A lot of countries have different financial year cycle. And.. this is just the tip of the iceburg.
- faeriechangling 4y agoNo open source community has been able to convince enough programmers and tax lawyers to do such a supermassive amount of tedious and boring work for free. This is also an area where being 99.9% correct isn’t good enough and you’re working with thousands of insane clients who constantly change their APIs and specifications. You practically need to have a government or private business develop such a thing.
- zouhair 4y ago> You practically need to have a government...develop such a thing. You just gave the answer. Gov tax agencies need to provide an API that devs can use.
- seaourfreed 4y agoIf/when people get censored by their merchant processor, they can switch to this.
- doorsopen 4y agoMaybe an uninformed question, but I tool a look at the documentation, the stripe plugin demo, and then looked at what stripe offers. As someone who uses neither but might be interested in subscription + shop type purchases, what do I get with KillBill+Stripe that I don't with just Stripe?
- jmacd 4y agoYou save .5% that are fees you would otherwise be paying to Stripe. You also get to manage the data and where it resides, if that is important to you.
- bredren 4y agoI didn’t realize there was a variable rate in stripe pricing. I had thought it was the same before volume for any payment product that involves cards.
- jmacd 4y agoNo. Stripe is a bit insidious (that's probably too negative of a characterization) in that way. Once you start using a product, the pricing for that product then gets rated on your bill. Stripe billing is .5%, Invoicing .4%, Tax .5%, Rev Rec .25%, etc. Products like Checkout are included in your prevailing rate (2.9% or whatever).
- bredren 4y agoThe definition can cover a fair amount of ground. My experience with the product has been that it has made very clear attempts to provide the user ID for SaaS implementations of the payments system. I first heard of someone who was using stripe to store all user data on the Running in Production podcast, I thought they were nuts. But then I went to reimplement the services this year due to the deprecation the "legacy" popover modal on Checkoit. The new version seems more about locking builders to stripe than it is about anti-fraud, checkout UX or developer experience. It’s subtle but can be discerned from the implementation details and docs or lack thereof. In that way I would suggest the company has made some insidious decisions about the product. On one hand, it’s hard to blame them, because before their API could be replicated and swapped out like S3.
- chromatin 4y agoAs much as I dislike Java, I very much appreciate the Kill Bill authors' approach to features -- via plugins. Unfortunately, the plugins mostly need to be written in Java, although I learned on this HN thread that there maybe a gRPC interface, so I'll take another look!
- billsix 4y agoOff topic but Kill Bill 1 and 2 were great but I hope they stop at Kill billfive
- princevegeta89 4y agoCame here to say I simply love the name
- mattjaynes 4y agoMan, I really had to search to find which payment gateways they support. I guess it makes their docs evergreen to not mention any, but it's one of the first questions many new users will have. After searching their docs with no luck, I finally just had to look at their github repos for plugins and there you can see some of them: https://github.com/orgs/killbill/repositories?q=plugin https://github.com/orgs/killbill/repositories?q=plugin
- bullen 4y agoThe problem with this is that you still have to calculate the VAT for each customer manually and submit that to your tax agency and transfer those funds. For now there are ONLY 2 (non stupid) alternatives that do that dirty work for you: - itch.io for one time products. (you could make manual subscriptions here redirecting your users every month/year) - gumroad.com for subscriptions. itch takes down to card fees only. gumroad takes more but it scales down as you earn more reaching parity at 30 cents + 2.9% per transaction if your lifetime earnings are $1+ million. I doubt any of the integrations this open-source project offers will be so much better that it makes it worth the global VAT overhead?
- marykms 4y agoThanks for pointing this out. I posted the URL for the info here, but we will find a way to make this easier to find in the docs and website. https://docs.killbill.io/latest/plugin_introduction.html#_list_of_open_source_plugins https://docs.killbill.io/latest/plugin_introduction.html#_li...
- gregoriol 4y agoWe have been using KillBill for many years for our SaaS product. While it is very nice to own our data, we have had a huge lot of issues with it too. Beware that this is an "industrial" tool, meaning that it is very complex, written in Java, with a lot of quirks and sharp edges. The core team also seems to mainly work on some closed-source version of it, for some not-very-clear-what big corp(s). They let you know sometimes that there exists a more feature-full closed-source version when asking questions in the support google group or on github issues, but it's not very transparent. If you are a startup with a small team or small budget and no real Java development skills, you'll probably want to be careful in considering to use it: many custom things you'll want to do will require contracting with one of their partners because it's too complicated to do yourself, and support will be limited, and debugging issues will be hugely complicated if you are not used to that tech stack... Just this week, we have had a major issue with it: after doing an `apt upgrade`, docker was updated and restarted. It restarted KillBill's docker images fine but KillBill itself restarted only the Stripe plugin, not the Avatax one, for an unknown reason. So the tool happily generated invoices and payments for a few hours without any taxes (!), until we noticed and started the plugin manually from the interface. This is the kind of issues we regularly have to deal with, and while the tool does a good job most of the time, it is mindblowingly annoying sometimes.
- miniBill 4y agoPlease don't kill me :(
- PointyFluff 4y agoThe name is cute, but I would change it out of concern of being sued by the movie industry.