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]
I saw the DO button post this morning, pretty cool indeed. We've recently been playing with Docker to standardize our deployments. Pushing an image to DO should be easy.
I'm wondering the same and obviously can't answer for them, but it looks like killbill is a two person side project. If they intend to monetize it, I'm sure they could do so by offering a hosted version of the library.
Yeehaw! That's exactly what I'm looking for. I think I stumbled upon Killbill over the summer but it wasn't quite where it is today. I'll definitely be taking a hard look at this.
Very nice indeed, I likewise have been looking for something like this and couldn't find a solution that's not either over-simplistic, or over-engineered "enterprisy" and expensive... until this.
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