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Show HN: BillaBear – Self-Hosted SaaS Subscription Management and Billing

107 points by that_guy_iain 3y ago

Bilal_io 3y ago
Relevant bit for those curious: > Is BillaBear Open Source? > No. BillaBear is released under the source-available license Business Source License. You can find it in the license.md. This is the same license as used by Sentry, CoackroachDB, and many more. > After 3-years from the release date of a version, it will then become open-source.
- rapnie 3y ago
  It will become GPL according to the license: https://github.com/billabear/billabear/blob/main/LICENSE https://github.com/billabear/billabear/blob/main/LICENSE
  - f_devd 3y ago
    They should have put that in the README, I'm quite sympathetic towards the delayed-FOSS model, but the source-available had me write it off.
    - that_guy_iain 3y ago
      I tried to. Clearly I didn't make it clear enough, I'll make it clearer that it goes to GPL after 3-years.
      - f_devd 3y ago
        Ah I see now it's at the end of the QA on OSS, the main confusion is with the initial "No. ... Source-available" Although it is more honest it also made me stop reading, switching around the paragraphs and adding the license it changes to (GPL3) would have fixed the confusion for me.
    - KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
      BSL is still much better than AGPL, which is used by the really slimy companies like Lago (YC funded too, many new YC open core companies are doing this now). https://www.getlago.com/ https://www.getlago.com/ If your main customer base is other SaaS providers, then making the app impossible to host on the same network or customize is essentially a bait-and-switch poison pill.
      - CitizenKane 3y ago
        I’m not sure how AGPL would prevent you from hosting on the same network. It’s pretty standard among OSS software companies to prevent Google, Amazon, et al. from swooping in and creating a competitor using their open source code.
      - pgt 3y ago
        Why do you consider Lago slimy?
      - martypitt 3y ago
        I really struggle with this attitude that companies that make their code available, but don't do it "open enough", are therefore "BadCompanies". Companies are not obligated to make their source code available (excl: copy-left, where they are). Those that do, often choose to do so in a way that balances aiding a community, and growing their business. That's a good thing IMO. Being commercially savvy, and ensuring the company that authors software today, will be here tomorrow, is good for the software, and therefore, for it's community. I don't understand where the sense of entitlement comes from that it's OK to shame/berate/insult a company who publishes their source code, because of the restrictions they elected to impose. Companies like Lago are small startups, who need to pay the staff to author the software. They also created a company to generate profits. Electing to do so under an Open Core model is a good thing - as we get Open Source software as a side-effect. They have no obligation to do so under a permissive license. That they do so under any license should be celebrated, IMO. > many new YC open core companies are doing this now. Great! Long may this continue. Companies that are open-core are beneficial for everyone. Splitting hairs over the license they elect seems ungrateful IMO.
dimmke 3y ago
I was just talking to a friend last night about how I didn’t know of any good off the shelf solutions for this sort of thing in the Node ecosystem like Laravel Spark. But it looks like this is also built in PHP. Is it headless- where the person implements their own UI and simply hits the REST api? It could probably work if it’s just a container. I’m in a position where I need to build something like this, but there’s still a lot of things I haven’t dealt with. The thing I’m building could potentially have thousands of different custom subscription plans - can this accommodate that? Also, how tightly coupled to Stripe is it? My other concern is that Stripe shuts down accounts so whatever solution I settle on, I’m looking for a “dumb pipe” approach where the vast majority of things are handled by the software and the payment processor can be replaced quickly. Also I tried to go to your user documentation and got a 403 forbidden error.
gregoriol 3y ago
How is it supposed to work if "Webhooks to listen for billing events" is on the roadmap? This is a strict requirement for any billing system...
- itake 3y ago
  I've been running my mobile app for 2+ years and never bothered supporting webhooks. It hasn't been an issue yet. Nefarious users can deconstruct my app to by-pass payments, but the juice to support them isn't worth the squeeze. If someone is willing to go through that much effort, they must really want to use my app and I will let them enjoy their prize :)
- that_guy_iain 3y ago
  Well, it listens to Stripe webhooks, but it doesn't have it's own webhooks system. I guess I should make that clearer to.
  - gregoriol 3y ago
    I mean: how do you integrate a billing system like BillBear into your own development, when there are no hooks available for situations like a payment success/failure or a new invoice being generated? This makes it almost useless
    - that_guy_iain 3y ago
      For many systems at the start they don't need it. But obivously for more complex systems they will which is why it's super high on the todo list. For more complex and mature applications there are tons of functionality still needed. Tax reports, subscription reports, auditing, webhooks, etc. But I wanted to get something released so I could start getting feedback on what to work on first instead of just guessing what needs done and never releasing. As is, for indie hackers it'll get the majority of the job done and more. And for quite a few SaaS platforms. It's when it comes to mature applications is where it's just not there yet.
      - 3y ago
montroser 3y ago
> BillaBear is a standalone Subscription Management and Billing System that integrates with Stripe This confused me -- is it standalone, or is it a front-end for Stripe? FYI, the links for "User Documentation" and "Technical Documentation" in your readme.md are pointing to the wrong place.
- that_guy_iain 3y ago
  > This confused me -- is it standalone, or is it a front-end for Stripe? It's both. Which is a bit confusing to be fair. My main idea was to target folk who are using Stripe Billing but want to migrate away or have more control over things. So you can continue to use Stripe Billing and use BillaBear for email templates, invoices, subscription management and have invoice customers which are separate. Or you're able to have a complete standalone billing process which just uses Stripe for payments. You're also able to migrate away from Stripe Billing to a standalone billing system by importing data from Stripe and then disabling the Stripe billing - which will go through and cancel the subscriptions and then bill them manually. > FYI, the links for "User Documentation" and "Technical Documentation" in your readme.md are pointing to the wrong place. Thanks! The doc site deployment process process. I've fixed that and the links will start to work.
  - eevo 3y ago
    Here's our main problem with Stripe for what it's worth - Stripe Subscriptions and Subscription Schedules are massively complicated and don't support our use case. Subscriptions support complex scenarios like proration and metered billing, but miss the mark on simple use cases. All I want to do is ship products when people are charged, but I also want to move the next charge (or next several charges around) based on end user requests. This is accomplished in Stripe using their "trial" functionality - which is a hack because the Subscription isn't in "trial", the customer just wanted to move the next invoice. Putting the Subscription in "trial" screws up Stripe out of the box analytics because they don't get counted as active Subscriptions. I'm not surprised you were driven to build your own Subscription platform, I wasn't around for the decision for us, but knowing what I know now, I probably would have built as well or looked at Chargebee or similar.
DeMoXz 3y ago
Did you have any Saas platform in order to use your application ?
GordonS 3y ago
Is this something like an alternative to Chargebee?
pc86 3y ago
A couple questions about this: 1. Does "lifetime upgrade license" mean you can upgrade forever without any additional fees? 2. Is the standard upgrade license going to behave that way as well, or will it be valid for a certain period of time and/or number of upgrades? 3. Emailing for pricing on a very tech-oriented, non-Enterprise, automated billing SaaS product seems like a chance to try to just gauge how much I can pay rather than just having set pricing. Or like you just haven't decided how much to charge yet. 4. Who did the logo at the top of the readme? I love it.
- qup 3y ago
  > 4. Who did the logo at the top of the readme? I love it. Seriously? I think we should consider it controversial, then, as I have the opposite reaction.
  - pc86 3y ago
    I usually don't really like that style - maybe it's because of the name or the matching colors between the character and the text but I think it works in this instance.
joewils 3y ago
What's the reasoning behind the lack of transparent pricing? > "How much does BillaBear cost? To get pricing email sales@billabear.com."
- esafak 3y ago
  Price optimization?
- that_guy_iain 3y ago
  Simple, I want to get people who are legitimately interested to contact me. Once you get to a certain price point, it's always a case of contact for pricing as it's a sales process.
fourseventy 3y ago
Stripe already has great subscription management. We use it for our SaaS billing. It seems like BillaBear is just a bad UI on top of what Stripe already offers?
- stevefromIT 3y ago
  Rude
- esafak 3y ago
  To put it another way: how is billabear better or different?
- gunapologist99 3y ago
  Perhaps you could change "It seems like.." to something like, "What does Billabear offer beyond what Stripe already offers?" You might like to re-read the site guidelines,. especially the "In Comments" section: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
stevefromIT 3y ago
Great job. Add Paypal. Stripe is toxic.
- esafak 3y ago
  What's the best option?
ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
Another one of these open source projects which are such an eyesore that I want to pluck out my eyes. Please for the love of God, make them look nice or just have it run in the terminal.
- martypitt 3y ago
  Looks like pull requests are open. Excited to see what you contribute.
  - esafak 3y ago
    It's not a charity; they just need to hire a designer when they have enough money.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  It is eye candy to me: I just know a UI like that will be intuitive
racl101 3y ago
I thought it was an invoicing system like Invoice Ninja at first.
hbcondo714 3y ago
Great to see another tool for helping folks manage their SaaS. BillaBear does remind me of Kill Bill – Open-Source Subscription Billing and Payments Platform discussed here last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33263603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33263603
- jasongill 3y ago
  Thanks for this, have been looking for an alternative to the commercial solutions that we have been using for the past decade and a half. This seems to fit the bill

107 points by that_guy_iain 3y ago

Relevant bit for those curious: > Is BillaBear Open Source? > No. BillaBear is released under the source-available license Business Source License. You can find it in the license.md. This is the same license as used by Sentry, CoackroachDB, and many more. > After 3-years from the release date of a version, it will then become open-source.

rapnie 3y ago
It will become GPL according to the license: https://github.com/billabear/billabear/blob/main/LICENSE https://github.com/billabear/billabear/blob/main/LICENSE
- f_devd 3y ago
  They should have put that in the README, I'm quite sympathetic towards the delayed-FOSS model, but the source-available had me write it off.
  - that_guy_iain 3y ago
    I tried to. Clearly I didn't make it clear enough, I'll make it clearer that it goes to GPL after 3-years.
    - f_devd 3y ago
      Ah I see now it's at the end of the QA on OSS, the main confusion is with the initial "No. ... Source-available" Although it is more honest it also made me stop reading, switching around the paragraphs and adding the license it changes to (GPL3) would have fixed the confusion for me.
  - KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
    BSL is still much better than AGPL, which is used by the really slimy companies like Lago (YC funded too, many new YC open core companies are doing this now). https://www.getlago.com/ https://www.getlago.com/ If your main customer base is other SaaS providers, then making the app impossible to host on the same network or customize is essentially a bait-and-switch poison pill.
    - CitizenKane 3y ago
      I’m not sure how AGPL would prevent you from hosting on the same network. It’s pretty standard among OSS software companies to prevent Google, Amazon, et al. from swooping in and creating a competitor using their open source code.
    - pgt 3y ago
      Why do you consider Lago slimy?
    - martypitt 3y ago
      I really struggle with this attitude that companies that make their code available, but don't do it "open enough", are therefore "BadCompanies". Companies are not obligated to make their source code available (excl: copy-left, where they are). Those that do, often choose to do so in a way that balances aiding a community, and growing their business. That's a good thing IMO. Being commercially savvy, and ensuring the company that authors software today, will be here tomorrow, is good for the software, and therefore, for it's community. I don't understand where the sense of entitlement comes from that it's OK to shame/berate/insult a company who publishes their source code, because of the restrictions they elected to impose. Companies like Lago are small startups, who need to pay the staff to author the software. They also created a company to generate profits. Electing to do so under an Open Core model is a good thing - as we get Open Source software as a side-effect. They have no obligation to do so under a permissive license. That they do so under any license should be celebrated, IMO. > many new YC open core companies are doing this now. Great! Long may this continue. Companies that are open-core are beneficial for everyone. Splitting hairs over the license they elect seems ungrateful IMO.

dimmke 3y ago

I was just talking to a friend last night about how I didn’t know of any good off the shelf solutions for this sort of thing in the Node ecosystem like Laravel Spark. But it looks like this is also built in PHP. Is it headless- where the person implements their own UI and simply hits the REST api? It could probably work if it’s just a container. I’m in a position where I need to build something like this, but there’s still a lot of things I haven’t dealt with. The thing I’m building could potentially have thousands of different custom subscription plans - can this accommodate that? Also, how tightly coupled to Stripe is it? My other concern is that Stripe shuts down accounts so whatever solution I settle on, I’m looking for a “dumb pipe” approach where the vast majority of things are handled by the software and the payment processor can be replaced quickly. Also I tried to go to your user documentation and got a 403 forbidden error.

gregoriol 3y ago

How is it supposed to work if "Webhooks to listen for billing events" is on the roadmap? This is a strict requirement for any billing system...

itake 3y ago
I've been running my mobile app for 2+ years and never bothered supporting webhooks. It hasn't been an issue yet. Nefarious users can deconstruct my app to by-pass payments, but the juice to support them isn't worth the squeeze. If someone is willing to go through that much effort, they must really want to use my app and I will let them enjoy their prize :)
that_guy_iain 3y ago
Well, it listens to Stripe webhooks, but it doesn't have it's own webhooks system. I guess I should make that clearer to.
- gregoriol 3y ago
  I mean: how do you integrate a billing system like BillBear into your own development, when there are no hooks available for situations like a payment success/failure or a new invoice being generated? This makes it almost useless
  - that_guy_iain 3y ago
    For many systems at the start they don't need it. But obivously for more complex systems they will which is why it's super high on the todo list. For more complex and mature applications there are tons of functionality still needed. Tax reports, subscription reports, auditing, webhooks, etc. But I wanted to get something released so I could start getting feedback on what to work on first instead of just guessing what needs done and never releasing. As is, for indie hackers it'll get the majority of the job done and more. And for quite a few SaaS platforms. It's when it comes to mature applications is where it's just not there yet.
    - 3y ago

montroser 3y ago

> BillaBear is a standalone Subscription Management and Billing System that integrates with Stripe This confused me -- is it standalone, or is it a front-end for Stripe? FYI, the links for "User Documentation" and "Technical Documentation" in your readme.md are pointing to the wrong place.

that_guy_iain 3y ago
> This confused me -- is it standalone, or is it a front-end for Stripe? It's both. Which is a bit confusing to be fair. My main idea was to target folk who are using Stripe Billing but want to migrate away or have more control over things. So you can continue to use Stripe Billing and use BillaBear for email templates, invoices, subscription management and have invoice customers which are separate. Or you're able to have a complete standalone billing process which just uses Stripe for payments. You're also able to migrate away from Stripe Billing to a standalone billing system by importing data from Stripe and then disabling the Stripe billing - which will go through and cancel the subscriptions and then bill them manually. > FYI, the links for "User Documentation" and "Technical Documentation" in your readme.md are pointing to the wrong place. Thanks! The doc site deployment process process. I've fixed that and the links will start to work.
- eevo 3y ago
  Here's our main problem with Stripe for what it's worth - Stripe Subscriptions and Subscription Schedules are massively complicated and don't support our use case. Subscriptions support complex scenarios like proration and metered billing, but miss the mark on simple use cases. All I want to do is ship products when people are charged, but I also want to move the next charge (or next several charges around) based on end user requests. This is accomplished in Stripe using their "trial" functionality - which is a hack because the Subscription isn't in "trial", the customer just wanted to move the next invoice. Putting the Subscription in "trial" screws up Stripe out of the box analytics because they don't get counted as active Subscriptions. I'm not surprised you were driven to build your own Subscription platform, I wasn't around for the decision for us, but knowing what I know now, I probably would have built as well or looked at Chargebee or similar.

DeMoXz 3y ago

Did you have any Saas platform in order to use your application ?

GordonS 3y ago

Is this something like an alternative to Chargebee?

pc86 3y ago

A couple questions about this: 1. Does "lifetime upgrade license" mean you can upgrade forever without any additional fees? 2. Is the standard upgrade license going to behave that way as well, or will it be valid for a certain period of time and/or number of upgrades? 3. Emailing for pricing on a very tech-oriented, non-Enterprise, automated billing SaaS product seems like a chance to try to just gauge how much I can pay rather than just having set pricing. Or like you just haven't decided how much to charge yet. 4. Who did the logo at the top of the readme? I love it.

qup 3y ago
> 4. Who did the logo at the top of the readme? I love it. Seriously? I think we should consider it controversial, then, as I have the opposite reaction.
- pc86 3y ago
  I usually don't really like that style - maybe it's because of the name or the matching colors between the character and the text but I think it works in this instance.

joewils 3y ago

What's the reasoning behind the lack of transparent pricing? > "How much does BillaBear cost? To get pricing email sales@billabear.com."

esafak 3y ago
Price optimization?
that_guy_iain 3y ago
Simple, I want to get people who are legitimately interested to contact me. Once you get to a certain price point, it's always a case of contact for pricing as it's a sales process.

fourseventy 3y ago

Stripe already has great subscription management. We use it for our SaaS billing. It seems like BillaBear is just a bad UI on top of what Stripe already offers?

stevefromIT 3y ago
Rude
esafak 3y ago
To put it another way: how is billabear better or different?
gunapologist99 3y ago
Perhaps you could change "It seems like.." to something like, "What does Billabear offer beyond what Stripe already offers?" You might like to re-read the site guidelines,. especially the "In Comments" section: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

stevefromIT 3y ago

Great job. Add Paypal. Stripe is toxic.

esafak 3y ago
What's the best option?

ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago

Another one of these open source projects which are such an eyesore that I want to pluck out my eyes. Please for the love of God, make them look nice or just have it run in the terminal.

martypitt 3y ago
Looks like pull requests are open. Excited to see what you contribute.
- esafak 3y ago
  It's not a charity; they just need to hire a designer when they have enough money.
quickthrower2 3y ago
It is eye candy to me: I just know a UI like that will be intuitive

racl101 3y ago

I thought it was an invoicing system like Invoice Ninja at first.

hbcondo714 3y ago

Great to see another tool for helping folks manage their SaaS. BillaBear does remind me of Kill Bill – Open-Source Subscription Billing and Payments Platform discussed here last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33263603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33263603

jasongill 3y ago
Thanks for this, have been looking for an alternative to the commercial solutions that we have been using for the past decade and a half. This seems to fit the bill