Neat! Seems similar to Lago (also open source): https://www.getlago.com/
Are you planning on adding other payment providers besides Stripe?
replies(2):
Typically, you have to write code to handle checkouts, upgrades/downgrades, failed payments, then receive webhooks to provision features, reset usage limits etc. We abstract this into one function call for all payments flows (checkouts, upgrades, downgrades etc), one function to record usage (so we can track usage limits), and a customer state React hook you can access from your frontend (to handle paywalls, display usage data etc).
Here’s a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFARthC7JXc
Stripe’s great! But there are 2 main reasons people use Autumn over a direct Stripe setup:
(1) Billing infra can get complex. After payments, there’s still handling webhooks, permission management, metering, usage resets, and connecting them all to upgrade, downgrade, cancellation and failed payments states.
(2) Growing companies iterate on pricing often: raising prices, experimenting with credits or charging for new features, etc. We save you from having to handle usage-based limits (super common in pricing today), rebuilding in-app flows, DB migrations, internal dashboards for custom pricing, and grandfathering users on different pricing.
Ripping out billing flows etc, really sucks. With Autumn, you just make pricing changes in our UI and it all auto-updates. We have a shadcn/ui component library that helps with this.
Because we support a lot of different pricing models (subscriptions, usage, credits, seat based etc), we have to handle a lot of different scenarios and cases under the hood. We try to keep setup simple while maintaining flexibility of a native integration. Here’s a little snippet of the architecture of our main endpoint: https://useautumn.com/blog/attach
Currently, the users who get the most value out of us are founders that need to move fast and keep things flexible, but also new/non-technical devs that are more AI native.
You can clone the project and explore the repo, or try it out at https://useautumn.com/, where it’s free for builders. Our repo is https://github.com/useautumn/autumn, docs are at https://docs.useautumn.com/ and demo at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFARthC7JXc
We’d love to hear your feedback and how we could make it better!
Are you planning on adding other payment providers besides Stripe?
I think in practise though we serve a very different segment. Lago is great for high-throughput event metering and mainly target series B+ companies. They don't yet have an offering for feature permissions management (aka entitlements).
Autumn is built more for early stage companies that have payments in-app. Hence we're trying to invest more in the developer experience (eg React hooks), while also providing that abstraction layer for entitlements too.
We absolutely will be adding more payment providers soon. Our biggest requests are Polar and Razorpay for the indian market.
The main reason that people use us is permissions management. We are the source of truth for which of your users can access what, and linking that to billing. Eg, we know that because user ABC is on Pro tier and bought 3 top ups, they have access to 75 AI credits. If their next payment fails, they should only have access to 15 AI credits (etc etc). Our value is in handling this matrix of scenarios related to usage resets, billing cycles, transitioning between monthly and yearly plans, etc.
Lago only handles billing, so if you're using them, then the logic to sync up the user's permissions with the billing state has to be handled yourself.