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BillaBear
Self-hosted subscription management and billing system that decouples billing logic and tax rules from Stripe.
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Overview
Stripe Billing locks subscription state, customer billing history, and tax rules inside a proprietary cloud while taking a recurring percentage of every invoice. BillaBear extracts that entire subscription layer into self-hosted infrastructure, retaining Stripe purely as the underlying payment gateway. Teams keep customer records, custom dunning rules, and pricing logic on their own servers without surrendering data sovereignty or paying revenue-share surcharges.
Why BillaBear instead of Stripe Billing
Stripe Billing bundles payment rails with subscription state, customer portals, invoice templates, and tax calculations. While convenient, this couples operational business records to Stripe's vendor ecosystem and restricts invoice and dunning customization. BillaBear separates these layers: Stripe handles transaction processing, while self-hosted BillaBear manages subscription lifecycles, calculates regional VAT and tax thresholds, and issues branded PDF invoices directly from internal databases.
Decoupling the billing engine eliminates Stripe's 0.5% to 0.8% billing fee and prevents third-party profiling of revenue streams. In return, control demands operational ownership. Where Stripe Billing provides automated PCI updates and zero server maintenance, BillaBear requires hosting a PHP and PostgreSQL environment, running queue workers, and securing API endpoints. Teams also remain tethered to Stripe for transaction capture, as BillaBear lacks multi-gateway routing for processors like Adyen or PayPal.
What it does well
- Self-hosted subscription lifecycles: Manages plan upgrades, downgrades, cancellations, and renewals locally so client records stay entirely within private infrastructure.
- Flexible pricing structures: Supports tiered volume, graduated stair pricing, seat-based subscriptions, and usage packages without custom billing code.
- Jurisdiction-aware tax rules: Applies country and state tax rates, handles EU reverse charge rules, and tracks economic nexus thresholds to charge tax only when required.
- Full template ownership: Renders invoices, quotes, and dunning notifications through Twig templates or connected email delivery providers rather than rigid hosted defaults.
- Fault-tolerant workflow engine: Automates multi-step billing tasks like provisioning callbacks and webhook retries, letting ops leads inspect and replay failures manually.