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Straight answers to the questions people ask before adopting Recurso. Where the honest answer is “not yet” or “partially,” it says so.

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Product & Positioning

Recurso runs a complete billing lifecycle — plans, customers, subscriptions, invoices, payments, dunning, usage metering, entitlements, and a double-entry ledger — with idempotent APIs and webhook delivery tracking. The core billing paths are built to be run for real.That said, it is a self-hosted system: you own operations. Before accepting live payments, work through the Going to Production checklist (live gateway keys, HTTPS, webhook signature verification, backups, monitoring) and run at least one end-to-end transaction with live keys. Some capabilities are explicitly incomplete — see the tax and roadmap answers below.
Self-host if you want full data ownership, no per-transaction fee, and control over your infrastructure. You run PostgreSQL, the API, and (optionally) TigerBeetle and Redis.Recurso Cloud is managed hosting — the team handles hosting, scaling, backups, and TLS, so you can skip most of the production checklist. It’s in early access; join the waitlist at cloud@recurso.dev. See Pricing for details. The API and SDK are identical either way — only the base URL changes.
Capability facts, not marketing:
  • Hosting — Recurso is self-hostable; Stripe Billing and Chargebee are SaaS only.
  • Pricing model — Recurso charges no percentage-of-revenue billing fee; you pay for your own infrastructure (or Cloud hosting).
  • Ledger — Recurso ships a built-in double-entry ledger with a reconciliation report as a first-class object.
  • India compliance — Recurso models GST (CGST/SGST/IGST), e-invoicing via the IRP, RBI e-mandates, and DPDP consent tracking natively.
  • License — Recurso is MIT (see below).
If you’re coming from one of these, see Migrate from Stripe or Migrate from Chargebee for concept mappings.

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Architecture

  • Go — a single statically-linked binary, low memory footprint, and strong concurrency for billing workers. Easy to deploy and operate.
  • PostgreSQL — the system of record. Battle-tested, transactional, and something most teams already know how to back up and run.
  • TigerBeetle — an optional purpose-built double-entry accounting database for high-throughput ledger writes. It is not required: when it isn’t running, Recurso uses the Postgres ledger and billing works end to end. That’s why the health watcher treats TigerBeetle as a warning, not critical.
No. It’s an optional performance backend for the ledger. Start without it; add it if your ledger write volume warrants it. See the TigerBeetle section of Troubleshooting for what the health warnings mean.

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Licensing & Data

Recurso is released under the MIT license — one of the most permissive open source licenses. You can self-host it, modify it, embed it in a commercial product, and run it for your own customers, at no license cost and with no copyleft obligation to publish your changes. The only requirement is retaining the copyright and license notice. There is no per-seat or per-transaction license fee.
On self-hosted deployments, you do — it lives in your PostgreSQL database, on your infrastructure. Recurso doesn’t phone home and there is no mandatory external dependency for core billing. You can pg_dump at any time and take your data with you.
Recurso includes consent tracking — recording, revoking, and querying customer and subscription-level consents — which supports DPDP-aligned workflows. Because you self-host, personal data stays in your own database under your control. See Consent Tracking. Recurso is a tool, not legal advice — confirm your obligations with counsel.

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Tax & Compliance Coverage

Coverage is deep for India, partial elsewhere — and Recurso is honest about the edges rather than guessing:
  • India (GST) — full: CGST/SGST for intrastate, IGST for interstate, place-of-supply logic, SAC codes, GSTIN validation, and e-invoicing via the IRP.
  • US sales tax — live jurisdiction rates via TaxJar when configured. Without TaxJar, US invoices ship at 0% explicitly marked sales_tax_stub — no silently wrong rates. See US Sales Tax.
  • EU / UK VAT — handled statically (reverse charge, exports); not a live rate service.
  • Nexus — not modeled inside Recurso. For the US, nexus is whatever your TaxJar account is configured for; Recurso records TaxJar’s answer honestly.
Almost always a configuration state, not a bug. Without TAXJAR_API_KEY, invoices are sales_tax_stub at 0% by design. With TaxJar configured, a 0% result usually means TaxJar reports no nexus in the buyer’s state. The Troubleshooting page walks through both cases.

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Operations

Pull the new code and restart the API — migrations run automatically at boot (and refuse to start on a dirty schema). They are additive and safe to re-apply, so re-running after an upgrade only applies what’s new. Take a database backup before upgrading production — billing data is critical. The Going to Production checklist covers backups and the incident runbook.
Use the cmd/import tool in the main repository. It loads plans, customers, and subscriptions without generating invoices or calling payment gateways, so migrated customers are never double-billed mid-cycle — each subscription keeps its original period and renews at current_period_end. It’s idempotent and supports a -dry-run. See Migrate from Stripe or Migrate from Chargebee.
Known gaps are documented honestly rather than hidden. Examples called out elsewhere in these docs: native nexus configuration (currently delegated to TaxJar), and operational limits noted in the incident runbook (single alert channel, no built-in status page, no per-worker kill switch). See the ROADMAP in the main repository.

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Next Steps

Quick Start

Get the stack running in under 5 minutes

Troubleshooting

Fixes for the most common setup issues

Glossary

Billing and Recurso terminology

Going to Production

The pre-launch checklist