Kill Bill is a free, open-source subscription billing platform. See its features, licensing, Aviate enterprise pricing, and top alternatives.
Kill Bill is an open-source subscription billing and payments platform originally built in 2010 by Martin Westhead, Pierre-Alexandre Meyer, and Stephane Brossier at Ning, and now maintained by The Billing Project, LLC in San Francisco. It is released under the Apache License 2.0, making the core engine free to self-host and use in production.
Rather than a fixed SaaS product, Kill Bill provides billing building blocks: a core engine for subscriptions, invoicing, and payment-state tracking, extended through a plugin architecture for payment gateways, tax calculation, and notifications.
The project has run in production since 2010 across thousands of installations, reportedly invoicing billions of dollars and processing millions of credit-card transactions, with Groupon cited as a notable user.
Kill Bill supports recurring, usage-based, and one-time billing, subscription catalogs with pricing plans and tiers, proration, invoice generation, and multi-currency, multi-timezone internationalization.
A plugin framework connects the core engine to payment gateways such as Stripe, PayPal, Adyen, and Braintree, plus tax integration via Avalara and custom notification and email plugins.
The platform supports multi-tenant, white-label deployments, letting a single installation serve many tenants or brands while maintaining data isolation and separate configuration.
The core Kill Bill software is completely free under the Apache 2.0 license, with no license fees, per-transaction charges, or vendor lock-in for self-hosted deployments.
Companies wanting a managed, supported, feature-extended version can purchase Aviate, an enterprise billing accelerator from the same founding team, sold through custom-quoted consulting packages rather than published pricing tiers.
Yes, the core Kill Bill software is free and open source under the Apache License 2.0, with no license or per-transaction fees for self-hosted use.
Kill Bill was designed and developed in 2010 by Martin Westhead, Pierre-Alexandre Meyer, and Stephane Brossier, originally as a project at Ning.
Aviate is a commercial, custom-quoted enterprise billing accelerator built on top of Kill Bill by the same founding team, offering managed support and additional quote-to-cash features.
Kill Bill connects to gateways like Stripe, PayPal, Adyen, and Braintree through its plugin architecture.
Kill Bill has been used in production since 2010 by companies including Groupon, and by various private and public companies invoicing billions of dollars cumulatively.
Common alternatives include Chargebee, Recurly, Zuora, Chargify (Maxio), and Stripe Billing.