Kill Bill

What Kill Bill does

Kill Bill handles subscription billing, usage billing, invoicing and payment routing. Its catalog supports plans, trials, discounts, add-ons, price lists and multiple currencies through XML and APIs.

Teams can create, change, pause, resume and cancel subscriptions, apply proration rules, retry failed payments and manage overdue states. Usage can be priced in tiers or blocks and billed in arrears.

Fees and plans

Kill Bill has a free plan and a free trial. The open-source editions are free, with the core project under the Apache 2.0 license. Community help is included, but there is no service-level agreement. Paid support for customer-managed deployments is purchased separately.

The Aviate plan is $9,999 a month when billed annually. It includes enterprise modules, catalog UI, metering, wallet, coupons, tax, health monitoring and Level 3 support.

The maker describes it as billed at about $40 a month, plus AWS infrastructure costs, while the customer operates the stack. Hosted Platform (ChaChing) uses a separate commercial model with price on request.

The maker lists paid plans from $40 a month, but does not publish a complete fee schedule for every hosted or support option.

Where it runs

Kill Bill runs through APIs and on Linux, macOS or Windows computers. It can be self-hosted on premises, in a private data center or in a customer's cloud account, with billing data kept in the customer's database.

Installation options include Docker Compose, Docker images, Tomcat, Kubernetes and building from source. The maker also describes a Linux cloud-server setup. A web back-office interface called Kaui manages catalogs, subscriptions and payments.

The phone platforms are therefore not specified; the documented interfaces are web, API and customer-managed computer or server deployments.

Protection and rules, as published

The maker says Kill Bill provides encryption in transit and at rest, TLS communications, AES-256 storage encryption, audit logs, role-based access controls and tenant isolation. Its API supports authenticated requests, configurable authentication backends, granular permissions and tenant secrets stored with hashing and salt.

The maker says its technical controls are intended to help enterprises meet SOC 2 and PCI-DSS requirements. This is a description of controls, not a statement that a customer's deployment meets either standard.

The provider says self-hosted customers operate and upgrade the system. Open-source support comes through mailing lists and GitHub without an SLA; Aviate offers engineer support with a one-business-day P1 response target.

Strengths

The platform combines subscription, usage, invoice and payment workflows in one programmable system. Plugins connect gateways, tax services, notifications and other business logic.

Its APIs, webhooks, SDKs and multi-tenant design support custom integrations and separate tenant data. Audit records show who changed an object, when, a reason code and a comment.

Catches and conditions

Self-hosting leaves infrastructure, upgrades and operations with the customer. Docker deployment requires Docker Compose and at least 4 GiB of memory; Tomcat deployment uses JDK 11, Tomcat 9.0.x and MySQL, MariaDB or PostgreSQL.

Hosted-platform pricing follows a separate commercial model, and AWS Marketplace also adds AWS infrastructure costs. Community support has no SLA. Check deployment requirements, support needs, currencies, tax plugins and gateway availability before choosing a setup.

Who may want another tool

Kill Bill may not fit a reader seeking a fully managed service, a published all-in price or a phone app.

Verdict

Kill Bill suits online businesses, startups and growth-stage teams that need programmable subscription and usage billing, multi-currency catalogs, payment plugins and control over deployment. Its free self-hosted editions reduce license cost but shift infrastructure, maintenance and support responsibilities to the customer. Aviate includes enterprise modules and support at a published annual-billing price, while other hosted options require separate pricing discussions. It is a less natural fit for buyers who want a simple, phone-first or fully managed billing service with one complete public price.

Questions