Alternatives to Hardcount
Hardcount: Open-source (MIT) self-hosted usage billing for AI products, an alternative to Stripe Billing and Lago: price tokens per model and token type on one meter, sell prepaid credit, add a base fee plus usage on one invoice, and see margin per customer and per model. Hardcount makes the invoices and Stripe charges the card, with failed-payment retries; test clocks preview invoices, and a LiteLLM proxy can send usage events. One Go program with Postgres and Redis; pre-1.0, Stripe and cards only, no SDKs yet. Looking for something different? Here are other tools in Payments.
Stripe
Payments infrastructure: checkout, subscriptions, invoicing and payment links.
Lemon Squeezy
Merchant of record for selling software and digital products, now part of Stripe.
Paddle
Merchant of record payments platform for SaaS businesses.
ForgeMesh Pay-per-Crawl
Open-source (GPLv2) WordPress plugin that answers AI crawlers, SEO crawlers and scripts with HTTP 402 and serves the page once they pay your per-page price in USDC on Base via x402, straight to your wallet. Humans and reverse-DNS-verified search engines read free; bot analytics and a Monitor mode in wp-admin.
Kairos
Finic's open-source (Apache-2.0) real-time fraud and risk decisioning platform, an alternative to Sift, Sardine, Riskified and SEON: one call returns approve, step up, review or block for each sign-up, login, order, payment or payout, with a risk score and reasons. Combines Finic's Grayson decision model, which answers plain-language questions like 'Is this email throwaway?', with logistic regression and gradient-boosted trees. An MCP server lets Claude Code, Cursor or Codex build workflows and run model experiments on your data. TypeScript and Python SDKs, a CLI and HTTP API; Kairos Cloud or self-host with Docker.
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