Autumn

At a Glance:

Autumn is an open-source billing layer that sits between Stripe and your application, letting developers build subscriptions, credit systems, usage-based pricing, and custom plans using just three API calls without handling webhooks or payment state logic.

Overview:

Autumn is an open-source billing abstraction layer designed to simplify how developers integrate complex pricing models into their applications. It acts as an intermediary between Stripe and application backend logic, allowing teams to create and manage subscriptions, credit systems, usage-based billing, and custom enterprise plans. The project addresses the growing complexity of billing infrastructure by decoupling pricing logic from core application code. Developers can define products and plans through a dashboard and then implement all billing logic through three core endpoints. Autumn explicitly aims to eliminate the need to manage payment webhooks, handle upgrade and downgrade flows, or deal with the operational burden of cancellations and failed payments.

Key Decision Points:

• Stripe dependency: Autumn currently functions as a layer on top of Stripe, meaning Stripe is a hard requirement for payment processing.

• Operational abstraction: The project removes the need for developers to implement upgrade/downgrade logic, cancellation flows, and payment failure handling directly.

• API surface area: All billing operations are consolidated into three function calls (/attach, /check, /track), reducing integration complexity.

• Pricing model flexibility: The dashboard supports creating usage-based limits, credit systems, seat-based billing, and upfront payment models without requiring database migrations or cron jobs for metering.

Core Features:

• Dashboard-based plan creation: Products and pricing plans are configured through a visual dashboard, supporting any pricing model without application-side changes.

• Unified purchase flow via /attach: A single function call handles all purchase scenarios, returning a Stripe Checkout URL or managing in-place plan upgrades and downgrades.

• Access and feature gating via /check: Developers can query whether a customer has access to a specific product, feature, or remaining usage allowance.

• Usage metering via /track: Applications record consumption events for usage-based features, with the platform handling real-time limits and overage detection.

• Multi-model pricing support: Explicitly supports subscriptions, credit systems with top-ups, seat-based billing with per-seat limits, and upfront fixed-quantity purchases.

Use Cases:

• SaaS applications: Developers building software with tiered subscriptions, per-seat licensing, or usage-based add-ons can offload billing logic and metering to Autumn.

• API products: Teams offering API access with credit-based or consumption-based pricing models can use /track for metering and /check for rate or access enforcement.

• Custom enterprise pricing: Companies that need to create bespoke plans for large customers with non-standard pricing, including grandfathering, can manage those through the dashboard rather than application logic.

Open-Source Alternative Value:

Autumn provides an open-source approach to billing abstraction, where the codebase that handles subscription state, usage metering, and plan management is transparent and self-hostable. For teams already using Stripe, it offers a way to avoid building and maintaining custom billing infrastructure for complex pricing models. The project's value lies in consolidating the operational complexity of webhooks, upgrade/downgrade state machines, and usage tracking into a dedicated, inspectable layer, rather than embedding that logic directly into the application codebase where it would need to be rebuilt with each pricing change.