Most companies don't leave Stripe Billing because Stripe is bad.

They leave because of what they built around it.

You see things like usage tracking in a separate microservice, credit management in a spreadsheet, and enterprise contract terms in a Google Doc that someone reconciles manually at month end.

We call this a split-stack problem: the compounding cost of routing billing logic through infrastructure that wasn't designed for your pricing model. It's not Stripe's fault. It's a billing v1 problem.

If you're reading this, you've probably hit one of the following: you added usage-based pricing on top of subscriptions and it broke your invoicing logic. You won your first enterprise deal with custom terms and realized there's no clean way to model it. You're building AI features and need to meter tokens or credits, but your billing system treats them like line items, not like financial primitives.

When that happens, you need a Stripe Billing alternative.

When Stripe Billing is the right choice

Before diving into alternatives, it's worth being honest: Stripe Billing is genuinely good for a specific set of companies.

Stripe Billing works well if you:

• Are a pure subscription business with predictable, recurring charges

• Are already using Stripe Payments and want billing as an extension of it, and don't ever plan to migrate or use another payment system

• Are early-stage company with VERY straightforward pricing

• Have a developer-first team that can customize using Stripe's APIs

If that's you, the switching cost likely isn't worth it. Stripe's ecosystem, developer experience, and payments integration are hard to replicate.

The trouble starts when pricing evolves. The moment you add hybrid pricing, custom enterprise contracts, AI feature metering, or multi-entity billing, Stripe's billing layer starts requiring engineering workarounds. Those workarounds are where the real cost lives.

Signs you've outgrown Stripe Billing

• Engineering is maintaining billing logic. If a pricing change requires a sprint, the billing logic lives in code and not in your billing system. That's 2-3 engineers maintaining infrastructure that should be configuration.

• Close cycles are measured in weeks. Finance teams that can't generate invoices without pulling from multiple systems are experiencing Stripe's limitation at scale: it's a payment processor with billing features, not a billing engine.

• You can't model your pricing in the UI. If your pricing has tiers, overages, credits, trial periods, custom terms, or any combination and you can't express it natively in Stripe then you've outgrown it.

• AI metering is in a spreadsheet. Token consumption, credit burn-down, per-inference charges: Stripe treats these as custom metadata fields. Managing them accurately at scale requires infrastructure Stripe doesn't provide.

7 Stripe Billing alternatives compared (2026)

Platform deep dives

Solvimon

Solvimon was built by Kim Verkooij and Etienne Gerts formerly VP Product and SVP Technology at Adyen, where they built and scaled Adyen's internal billing engine to handle €970B+ in annual payment volume.

The architectural insight from Adyen: billing at scale isn't a feature problem. It's a ledger problem. Complex billing breaks because the underlying ledger can't reconcile variable costs, credit burn-down, co-terming, and revenue recognition simultaneously without custom orchestration code.

Solvimon handles hybrid pricing models natively with subscriptions, usage metering (including token and credit metering for AI features), enterprise custom contracts, CPQ and quoting, and RevRec (ASC 606). It connects to Stripe, Adyen, and Checkout.com.

For AI companies under $5M billed, no percentage-of-revenue fee.

Best for: AI-native companies and B2B SaaS with $5M+ ARR scaling from PLG self-serve to enterprise SLG contracts, or companies that need to meter AI features at the token/credit level with real margin visibility.

Chargebee

Chargebee is the default choice for subscription-heavy SaaS companies who've outgrown Stripe but aren't yet running complex hybrid models. Over 200 integrations, strong RevOps tooling, solid dunning management.

The limitation: Chargebee was designed for subscription billing. Usage-based and metered billing exists, but it's not real-time, and managing AI inference costs or credit-based models requires workarounds. For straightforward recurring billing with light usage components, it's a solid choice.

Best for: Mid-market SaaS companies with standard subscription models, occasional usage overages, and a need for mature integrations.

Lago

Lago is the "open-source" billing infrastructure play. If your team wants full architectural control over billing logic, Lago is the most customizable option on this list.

The tradeoff is explicit however: Lago requires engineering investment. You own the infrastructure. The managed cloud version removes some of that burden, but if you're evaluating Lago to escape building billing, look elsewhere. Lago is for teams that want to build just on a foundation rather than from scratch.

Best for: Engineering-led teams who need full customization, operate open-source infrastructure, and have the bandwidth to own the billing layer.

Orb

Orb is purpose-built for high-volume, usage-heavy SaaS companies that iterate pricing frequently. Its event streaming architecture handles massive metering volume, and its pricing model abstraction layer makes it fast to change pricing logic without engineering.

Where it falls short: enterprise contract billing. Orb is optimized for product-led growth with complex custom contracts, quoting, and revenue recognition require additional tooling.

Best for: High-volume usage-based SaaS companies with frequent pricing experiments and a developer-first team.

How to choose a Stripe Billing alternative

The right choice depends on one question: where does your billing complexity live?

• If flexibility and complexity is in your pricing model (hybrid subscriptions + usage, credits, AI metering): You need a billing engine with strong metering primitives and real-time usage tracking. Solvimon or Maxio depending on your engineering appetite.

• If complexity is in your contracts (enterprise custom terms, co-terming, multi-entity): You need a platform with CPQ and contract management baked in. Solvimon or Maxio.

• If complexity is in your revenue recognition (ASC 606, multi-entity RevRec, SaaS metrics for investors): Maxio.

• If complexity is in your volume (millions of billing events per month, multi-geo, multi-currency): Solvimon or M3ter. Stripe's metering system isn't there yet.

• If you want to own the architecture and have the engineering bandwidth: Lago.

The migration question you should be asking

Switching billing systems is a non-trivial investment. The companies that regret it are the ones who switch too early (simple pricing, no real pain) or too late (billing debt is so severe that migration becomes a 6-month project).

The right time to migrate is when the cost of staying exceeds the cost of moving. For most companies, that inflection point arrives around $10-15M ARR — when pricing complexity, close cycle inefficiency, and engineering overhead converge into a real cost line.

If you're there, the question isn't whether to migrate. It's which infrastructure is worth building on.

Solvimon is billing infrastructure built by the team that scaled Adyen's billing engine to €970B+ in annual volume. It handles hybrid pricing, AI metering, credits, enterprise contracts. Book a demo