Challenge

Speechify launched in 2017 as a text-to-speech app that turned written words into audio. As demand grew for more AI-powered interactions, Speechify expanded into a broader voice AI platform, building products for working professionals, businesses deploying voice agents, and developers accessing its speech models through an API.

In 2024, as AI became central to the business, strong demand for voice AI from outside the US drove Speechify to accelerate its international expansion. To support that growth, the company needed payments infrastructure that could keep up with both globalization and the rapid evolution of its products and pricing.

Optimizing for international user acquisition meant supporting local currencies and locally trusted payment methods. Launching new AI products, agentic features, and customer segments required a billing system flexible enough to support new subscription types and tiers. Meanwhile, scaling a global user base opened the door to increased fraud exposure, and tax compliance became more complex with every new market.

“We’re a global company, so being able to charge users in more than 200 countries in their local currency has always been important to establish trust and make it easy to get started with Speechify,” said Rohan Pavuluri, chief business officer at Speechify.

Solution

Speechify had run on Stripe since day one. As AI became central to the business, Speechify deepened the relationship, relying on Stripe’s expertise serving fast-growing AI companies.

To optimize global conversion with a trusted, frictionless checkout, Speechify adopted Stripe Payments and the Stripe Optimized Checkout Suite. This gave the company prebuilt payment UIs, dynamically surfaced payment methods, and Link, a wallet built by Stripe that enables customers to check out faster with their preferred payment method. The company used the payment element to enable digital wallets including Apple Pay and Google Pay, ACH, and local payment methods UPI in India, Pix in Brazil, SEPA in the EU and UK, iDEAL|Wero in the Netherlands, and Przelewy24 in Poland. AI models built into the Optimized Checkout Suite determine which payment methods appear, and in what order, for each checkout.

As Speechify added new products and business lines, Stripe Billing made it straightforward to introduce new pricing tiers for recurring subscriptions. Speechify also relies on revenue-recovery features including Smart Retries and the card account updater to retain revenue that might otherwise be lost to failed payments.

To protect its growing global user base, Speechify adopted Stripe Radar to detect and block fraudulent activity at scale, including with custom rules tailored to emerging risk patterns.

The company also implemented Stripe Tax to identify where to collect tax and accurately calculate and charge tax across geographies. Automated filing and centralized location-specific sales tax reports simplified compliance for Speechify’s internal finance teams.

Results

Speechify scales with a partner built for AI companies

As Speechify launched more AI-native products, it relied on Stripe’s expertise supporting AI companies and hands-on support that functioned like an extension of its own team.

“Stripe has created an organization specifically tailored to serving AI companies, with AI-focused salespeople and consultants,” said Pankaj Agarwal, chief financial officer at Speechify. “Having access to that body of knowledge has been very helpful.”

Speechify delivers a seamless checkout for customers around the world

By supporting local currencies and offering the payment methods that customers in each market already trust, Speechify optimized the checkout experience across its global user base.

“Payment methods are extremely important because not all users have the same level of trust in different platforms,” said Agarwal. “When Stripe enables payment through Apple Pay or Google Pay, that leads to higher conversions.”

New revenue streams launch faster with flexible billing

Rather than rebuilding its billing logic each time it enters a new line of business, Speechify uses Billing to stand up subscriptions for new products and bring them to market quickly.

"It's never difficult for us to spin up a new subscription to support new business segments like developers and voice agents,” said Pavuluri.

Speechify manages fraud at scale as its user base surpasses 60 million

As Speechify’s user base grew into the tens of millions, Radar helped the company manage fraud at scale by screening transactions and applying custom rules.

Speechify simplifies global tax collection

Instead of tracking rapidly changing rates across every new region manually, Speechify relies on Tax to calculate what’s owed and centralize location-specific reporting, saving its internal finance team valuable time.

"Stripe has the tax expertise to calculate every rate correctly, no matter where in the world,” said Agarwal. “It just makes life easier.”