Kill Bill is an open source subscription billing and payments platform you self-host — a Chargebee and Stripe Billing alternative that runs plans, invoicing, and usage-based pricing on your own infrastructure at a fixed cost, not a cut of revenue.

What is Kill Bill?

Kill Bill is an open source subscription billing and payments platform that you run on your own infrastructure. It manages the full billing lifecycle — subscriptions, trials, promotions, invoicing, and payment collection — for SaaS, usage-based, and prepaid/postpaid models, and has been maintained as an open source project for over ten years.

What is Kill Bill best for?

Companies that want to own their billing stack instead of renting it — teams whose billing logic is too complex or too high-volume for a hosted service’s per-revenue pricing, and developers who need an API-first, extensible engine they can wire into their own catalog, gateways, and analytics.

What can Kill Bill do?

Run subscription billing with trials, add-ons, promotions, and mid-cycle plan changes
Meter and invoice usage-based and tiered pricing through the Usage APIs
Process payments through plugins for Stripe, PayPal, Adyen, and other gateways
Manage everything from Kaui, the included back-office admin console
Serve multiple logical tenants on one set of servers and databases
Extend behavior with a plugin framework (payment, invoice, and control plugins) managed via KPM
Track every change with built-in audit trails and role-based access control

Where does Kill Bill fall short?

It’s not a payment processor. Kill Bill orchestrates billing but relies on a gateway plugin (Stripe, Adyen, PayPal) to actually move money, so you still bring your own processor.
It’s deliberately “not an all-in-one solution” and it’s API-first — you define catalogs in XML, wire in plugins, and build much of the customer-facing experience yourself. Kaui is an admin console, not a polished self-service portal.
It’s a JVM application: it needs JDK 11, a MySQL/MariaDB/PostgreSQL database, and roughly 4GiB of RAM minimum, which is a heavier footprint than a lightweight service.

Is Kill Bill free?

Yes — Kill Bill is fully open source under the Apache 2.0 license and free to self-host, with full access to the source code and plugins. The maintainers also offer Aviate, a managed cloud version, and commercial support through The Billing Project, both priced at a fixed rate rather than a percentage of your revenue.

What does Kill Bill replace?

Kill Bill is a self-hosted alternative to hosted billing services like Stripe Billing, Chargebee, Recurly, and Zuora. It does the same subscription and usage-based billing job, but you run it yourself and pay for infrastructure instead of a cut of every transaction.

FAQ

Is Kill Bill open source? Yes. Kill Bill is licensed under the Apache License 2.0, an OSI-approved open source license, and its full source and plugins are on GitHub.

Can I self-host Kill Bill for free? Yes. The software is free to self-host via Docker, an AWS one-click installer, or Apache Tomcat — you only pay for the servers and database it runs on.

Is Kill Bill a good Chargebee or Stripe Billing alternative? For teams with complex billing or high volume, yes — you avoid per-revenue pricing and keep your billing data in-house. For a simple subscription with little engineering time to spare, a hosted service is faster to start.

What do I need to run Kill Bill? A server with JDK 11, a supported database (MySQL, MariaDB, or PostgreSQL), and around 4GiB of RAM. Kaui, the admin console, runs alongside it with its own database.