Here's how ElevenLabs scaled with Stripe

At ElevenLabs, we've created an AI voice model that's natural and realistic. Our voices are expressive, nuanced, and practical for a range of use cases. 

Audio is one of the strongest ways AI can trigger emotions in people engaging with the technology. One of the few ways it can “genuinely make you feel something.” But achieving this involved more than modeling alone. Scaling high-quality voice requires solving product, infrastructure, and business challenges simultaneously. 

Working with Stripe early on enabled us to move fast, stay lean, and focus on building.

From 11 Voices to 2,000+

We started with just eleven voices. From the start, it was clear a few presets wouldn't meet global demand. We needed a platform offering users a diverse, rights-cleared voice selection.

This meant developing a voice marketplace, not only synthetic models, but real clones of real voices covering a range of accents, languages and dialects. 

A single engineer initially set up Stripe Billing, rapidly enabling subscriptions. Stripe's flexibility allowed us to seamlessly introduce usage-based pricing and scale our platform quickly. Today, our self-serve platform supports hundreds of thousands of users — including notable enterprises like Perplexity, Time Magazine, and Bertelsmann.

As well as user growth, our platform hosts over 2,000 voices, thanks to talented actors and ordinary people contributing via our marketplace.

Powering a Global Voice Marketplace

Creating this marketplace required managing licensing, rights, payments, and international compliance. Stripe Connect simplified this through one integration.

Voice actors maintain control over their voices. Stripe manages KYC, payouts, and fraud protection seamlessly. To date, we've distributed over $3 million to contributors — with some earning over $10,000 monthly in passive income.

All payment operations are handled by just one part-time engineer.

Building this infrastructure internally — across currencies, taxes, and compliance — would have required a dedicated team. Stripe allowed us to stay focused on product development and research.

Scaling Fast by Staying Lean

AI evolves quickly — and so do we. At ElevenLabs, it's like being in a race: normal engineering and product development compete to keep pace, while our research team provides new models that act like a nitro boost, pushing us ahead of competitors.

That's why we choose tools that don't just scale, but adapt. Stripe gives us the flexibility to ship, test, and evolve rapidly.

We’re proud to feature in Stripe’s annual letter — and grateful for a partnership growing as quickly as we do.