Meteroid: Free Open Source Alternative to Stripe Billing & Chargebee

Managing subscriptions, usage-based pricing, invoices, and payments can quickly become one of the most complex parts of running a SaaS business. Platforms like Stripe Billing and Chargebee provide powerful solutions, but businesses looking for more control over their billing infrastructure may prefer an open-source alternative.

Meteroid is an open-source billing platform built for modern SaaS companies. It provides tools for managing subscriptions, complex pricing models, usage-based billing, invoices, coupons, and payment integrations from a unified platform.

Meteroid is particularly interesting for businesses with more sophisticated billing requirements. It supports flat subscriptions, usage-based pricing, tiered models, hybrid pricing, and other configurations while keeping the billing layer separate from the underlying payment provider.

Let's explore what Meteroid has to offer.

Workspace Creation

After deploying Meteroid, one of the first steps is setting up your workspace.

The workspace acts as the central environment where your billing configuration is managed. From here, you can configure the organization behind your billing system and start building your product catalog.

This structure is useful when billing involves more than simply charging a fixed monthly subscription. Products, plans, customers, subscriptions, invoices, metrics, and integrations can all be managed within the same platform.

For teams migrating away from an existing billing system, Meteroid also provides tools and documentation designed to help structure the transition.

Environments

Billing is one of those systems where testing directly in production is rarely a good idea.

Meteroid addresses this through separate environments, allowing teams to configure and validate their billing logic before applying it to real customers.

For example, you can test new plans, usage metrics, subscriptions, and billing behavior without interfering with your production billing data.

This becomes particularly important when working with usage-based billing, where incorrectly configured metrics or pricing rules could otherwise result in incorrect customer invoices.

Plans

Plans are at the center of Meteroid's billing model.

A plan defines what a customer receives and how they are charged. Meteroid supports monthly and annual subscriptions alongside more sophisticated pricing structures such as usage-based pricing, capacity commitments, one-time charges, and recurring charges.

Plans can be configured as Standard, Free/Freemium, or Custom, making it possible to support both self-service SaaS subscriptions and sales-led contracts.

Meteroid also uses plan versioning. You can work on a plan as a draft, publish it when ready, and later create a new version when pricing needs to change. Existing subscribers can remain on their current version while new customers receive the latest one.

This gives product and finance teams significantly more flexibility when pricing evolves over time.

Metrics

One of Meteroid's strongest features is its support for usage-based billing.

Instead of charging every customer the same amount, you can create billable metrics based on how customers actually use your product.

A metric can represent things such as:

• API requests
• Storage consumed
• Compute time
• Messages sent
• Active users
• AI tokens consumed

Meteroid receives raw usage events and aggregates them according to the metric configuration. Available aggregation strategies include Count, Count Distinct, Sum, Mean, Minimum, Maximum, and Latest.

Metrics can also be segmented. For example, a cloud infrastructure product could charge different prices depending on cloud provider or geographic region.

This makes Meteroid suitable for SaaS products where a simple "$20 per user per month" model isn't enough.

Coupons

Meteroid also includes a built-in coupon system for handling promotions and negotiated discounts.

Coupons can provide either a fixed discount or a percentage discount, and you can configure optional expiration dates and redemption limits.

This gives you the flexibility to create promotions such as a percentage off a subscription, a fixed monetary discount, or a limited campaign available only to a specific number of customers.

Coupons can subsequently be disabled, archived, restored, or updated from the Meteroid interface.

Combined with trials and flexible plans, this provides a practical way to manage both standard SaaS promotions and more customized commercial offers.

Invoices & Payment Links

Meteroid isn't limited to calculating subscription prices. It also manages the invoicing process.

Invoices provide the detailed financial record behind customer charges, including the different subscription and usage components contributing to the final amount.

This becomes particularly valuable with usage-based pricing because customers need to understand not only how much they are being charged but also why.

Meteroid also provides checkout and payment functionality that can be integrated into the customer billing flow, allowing businesses to connect billing logic with the actual collection of payments.

The result is a centralized system where subscriptions, usage data, invoices, and payments remain connected instead of being handled by several independent tools.

Payment Providers & Integrations

An important distinction with Meteroid is that the billing platform and the payment processor don't necessarily have to be the same system.

Meteroid manages your billing logic while connecting to payment providers for payment collection.

This architecture gives businesses more control over their billing stack and reduces how tightly their product's billing model is coupled to a single payment processor.

Meteroid also supports integrations with external business tools. Its documentation currently covers integrations across areas such as CRM and accounting, including platforms such as HubSpot and Pennylane.

This allows billing information to become part of a broader business workflow rather than remaining isolated inside the billing platform.

Dashboard & Reports

Once customers and subscriptions start generating revenue, Meteroid provides dashboards and analytics for understanding what is happening across the business.

Instead of looking only at individual transactions, teams can use Meteroid's intelligence and reporting features to analyze billing and revenue information from a broader perspective.

For SaaS companies, this is particularly useful because subscription and usage data can reveal considerably more than payment transactions alone.

You can use these insights to better understand customer behavior, revenue performance, and how different parts of your pricing model contribute to the business.

Having these tools alongside the billing engine also means you don't necessarily need to export everything into another platform just to understand your billing activity.

Documentation

If you want to go deeper into Meteroid, the official Meteroid documentation provides detailed guides covering the platform's major components.

You'll find documentation for billable metrics, plans and pricing models, subscriptions, customers, invoices, credit notes, entitlements, analytics, integrations, and API usage.

There is also a dedicated Stripe migration guide for businesses considering moving their billing infrastructure from Stripe Billing to Meteroid.

Because Meteroid exposes APIs alongside its management interface, developers can integrate billing directly into their applications while operations, finance, and product teams manage much of the configuration through the platform itself.

Conclusion

Meteroid is a compelling open-source alternative to platforms like Stripe Billing and Chargebee, particularly for SaaS businesses that need flexible subscription and usage-based billing.

Its combination of configurable plans, billable metrics, coupons, invoicing, payment-provider integrations, and analytics covers much of the billing lifecycle while giving businesses greater control over their infrastructure and data.

The usage-based billing capabilities are especially interesting for modern SaaS and AI products, where pricing increasingly depends on API calls, compute resources, tokens, storage, or other consumption metrics rather than simple fixed subscriptions.

And because Meteroid is open source, you're not restricted to a proprietary billing platform.

If you'd like to run your own instance without having to manage the underlying infrastructure yourself, you can deploy Meteroid on Elestio as a fully managed service, with installation, configuration, backups, security, monitoring, and updates handled for you.

For more technical information and integration guides, you can also explore the official Meteroid documentation.