Schematic vs. Autumn: A Practical Guide to Choosing the Right Billing Layer on Stripe
Ryan Echternacht
·
01/14/2026
Stripe is the default starting point for most modern SaaS companies. It’s reliable, widely understood, and great at the core problem of payments.
Where teams tend to run into trouble is everything around Stripe. Stripe gives you the raw building blocks for billing, but using these building blocks in your product can get messy. Most teams end up building their own brittle, bespoke logic for feature access, usage limits, and plan changes. Over time, this creates real technical debt that makes pricing and packaging changes time consuming and error-prone.
That’s the problem both Autumn and Schematic are trying to solve. Both sit on top of Stripe, simplify managing Stripe, and give your application a cleaner way to understand billing state. For teams that have had to build and maintain their own Stripe webhook pipelines, this alone can be a meaningful improvement.
The difference isn’t whether they help — they both do. The difference is how much billing and monetization complexity they’re designed to handle as your product, pricing, and go-to-market evolve.
At a high level, Autumn is an open-source platform optimized for self-serve, plan-driven billing, while Schematic is built to support billing and entitlements across both product-led and sales-led motions.
Autumn is designed to simplify how applications work with Stripe. It sits on top of Stripe, abstracts away webhook handling, and gives your product a cleaner way to understand plans, usage, credits, and entitlements.
This approach works well for teams running primarily self-serve, plan-driven billing. Pricing is defined upfront, entitlements flow directly from plans, and usage accrues predictably. Autumn is explicit that it’s not optimized for heavily sales-led or invoice-driven businesses, which allows it to stay opinionated and easier to reason about.
Autumn is also open source, which appeals to teams that value transparency and want more direct visibility into their billing layer.
Schematic is built for teams looking for an end-to-end monetization solution on top of Stripe. It removes the need to manage Stripe webhooks directly and combines billing, entitlements, and purchasing into a single system.
In the product, Schematic makes enforcing access and usage as straightforward as a feature flag check. Product code can answer questions like “can this customer do this?” or “do they have remaining usage?” with simple, low-latency calls, without custom billing logic. This allows limits, access, and usage to be enforced consistently across APIs, UIs, and internal tools.
Beyond enforcement, Schematic provides components for checkout and upgrades, supports customer-level overrides and custom deals, and is designed to work across both self-serve and sales-led flows. This makes it well suited for companies running hybrid PLG and SLG motions, where pricing and packaging evolve over time.
For most SaaS businesses, the bulk of revenue doesn’t come from individual self-serve upgrades. It comes from large ACV deals — annual contracts, negotiated terms, and enterprise customers who buy through formal procurement processes.
Even products that are often cited as PLG success stories still depend on this motion. Tools like Asana, Slack, and Zoom all grew through strong self-serve adoption, but their meaningful revenue comes from enterprise customers. Large organizations don’t self-serve into company-wide rollouts. They require contracts, invoices, security reviews, custom terms, and flexibility around access and usage.
Schematic is designed with this reality in mind. It assumes that sales-led deals are a natural extension of product-led growth, not a departure from it. Custom entitlements, overrides, and contract-specific terms are expected inputs, and they flow directly into product enforcement. That allows teams to support enterprise buyers without fragmenting billing logic or slowing down the product.
This usually shows up sooner than teams expect. Teams that delay sales-led flexibility often find themselves blocked at the moment momentum picks up, when larger customers want to expand and deals become more complex. Schematic is built to make that transition incremental rather than disruptive.
There isn’t a single “right” choice here. Both Autumn and Schematic exist because Stripe alone doesn’t solve the full problem of billing inside a product, and both can be a real improvement over rolling your own logic.
The decision mostly comes down to how your product sells today, and how you expect it to sell as it grows. With that in mind, here’s a practical way to think about when each tends to make more sense.
Choose Autumn if:
your product is only self-serve
you have no plans to sell larger, custom deals
open source and inspectability are core requirements
Schematic is a better fit when:
you expect a hybrid PLG + sales motion
pricing, packaging, or entitlements will evolve frequently
billing needs to serve product, sales, support, and finance
Both approaches can work. The key is choosing a system that won’t become a constraint when your pricing, customers, and go-to-market inevitably change.
Autumn and Schematic both aim to solve the same core problem: Stripe is the standard, but using billing data reliably inside your product takes more work than most teams expect. Autumn’s open-source, opinionated approach works well for self-serve, plan-driven products that want billing to stay simple, transparent, and easy to reason about. For teams that value OSS and expect pricing to remain fairly consistent across customers, that can be a strong fit.
Schematic is built for a broader set of realities. It treats monetization as infrastructure, something that needs to support enforcement in code, customer-facing purchase flows, and the flexibility required for enterprise and sales-led deals. For teams that expect larger contracts, negotiated terms, or a hybrid PLG and sales motion over time, Schematic is designed to handle that complexity without becoming a bottleneck. If billing is likely to shape how your product grows and how revenue is generated, that extra headroom tends to matter sooner than expected.