How ElevenLabs’ mobile app hit $1M ARR in just 16 days

Key Outcomes

• Shipped two fully revenue-generating apps in a matter of weeks 
• Centralized monetization for two apps each with a hybrid monetization model with both available across 3 platforms 
• Reached $1M ARR in just 16 days with the ElevenLabs mobile app
• Unlocked engineering capacity for strategic work, not maintaining monetization pipes

A lean team focused on building the frontier of AI audio on mobile 

Most know ElevenLabs as a web application for text-to-speech, voice agents, and the API that’s become foundational for creators building with voice AI. The company recently surpassed $330M ARR with clients like Epic Games, Cisco, Chess.com,  Perplexity and more. But behind the scenes, a lean team of 10 developers has been pushing hard on an important new frontier: native mobile.

ElevenLabs operates as a series of small, autonomous, fast-moving teams, each responsible for owning outcomes end to end. For the mobile team, that means moving quickly, making sharp product decisions, and spending time on work that directly improves the user experience, and delivering bold new AI experiments,not maintaining infrastructure.

“We do culturally think of ourselves and try to operate as an interconnected set of startups that each move quickly within ElevenLabs.”
— Jack McDermott

Jack leads ElevenLabs’ mobile team, which over the last year and a half has shipped both the ElevenLabs and the ElevenReader app across iOS, Android, and web.

For ElevenLabs, the move into mobile isn’t a side quest. It’s strategic. Creators often start and finish their workflows on phones, and ElevenLabs wants to meet them where they are. The company sees the line between creator and consumer fading, and mobile is key to building experiences that can reach both.

With fewer than 10 people for much of the past year, the mobile team couldn’t afford to split focus or take on large, low-leverage technical projects. Every engineering decision had to support speed, reliability, and momentum.

“As a company moving at the speed of AI, we couldn’t justify putting multiple engineers on payments infrastructure for a couple of months. That time is better spent shipping product, iterating, and improving the experience for users. And then to potentially introduce errors or bugs and then have to maintain payments, we knew solely building purchases ourselves was out of the question.” – Marcin Jeleński, the team’s mobile engineering lead

Complexities of a multi-platform hybrid monetization model

ElevenLabs isn’t a simple “one subscription, one paywall” business. Like many AI-first products, the company’s monetization spans multiple payment models.

In addition to subscriptions, users can buy credit packs for usage-based consumption and purchase content directly, like audiobooks and ebooks. All of that has to work across the App Store, Google Play, and Stripe on the web and it has to stay aligned with ElevenLabs’ broader billing structures and customer records.

That cross-platform and multi-product reality creates the kind of complexity that grows exponentially. It’s not just SKU setup. It’s entitlement logic. It’s credit allocation and usage tracking. It’s keeping the customer state consistent across devices and platforms. Said Jack,

“Our users expect a single, coherent experience: their subscription, their credits, their content just work everywhere. When you’re running the same product across iOS, Android, web, and Stripe, every change to a product adds to complexity. And when you add trials and intro offers, the edge cases just multiply.”

RevenueCat as the solution

ElevenLabs chose RevenueCat to unify and manage monetization across iOS, Android, and web, so their engineering team could keep its focus where it matters: shipping a great product.

“It’s in our best interest to spend the vast majority of our time building new interactions and experiences as opposed to trying to connect the pipes between each of our payment systems. RevenueCat let’s us do that.”

That “pipe-connecting” problem showed up in multiple places at once. RevenueCat helped ElevenLabs connect SKUs across platforms, synchronize entitlement and customer state, and keep usage-based credit allocation and access rules consistent, even as pricing structures and offers evolved.

“The ability to connect the SKUs across all of our platforms and the synchronization of credit allocation, of usage, of purchases — to not have to develop or maintain any of that is huge.”

On the growth side, RevenueCat also became a source of truth the team could act on quickly. ElevenLabs streams RevenueCat events into BigQuery via webhooks to keep a complete log of payments events and power deeper analysis in their BI tooling. Jack’s team also relies on RevenueCat’s out-of-the-box reporting for fast, high-confidence answers to mobile questions that are otherwise easy to get wrong.

“While we integrate with BigQuery for the heavy lifting, you still need an opinionated layer that understands the nuances of mobile subscriptions. RevenueCat’s analytics give us that opinionated layer with mobile‑native views on trials, renewals, and churn that would take real analytics effort to rebuild accurately on our own.”

With monetization handled, ElevenLabs could move at the pace of its product and market, enabling their app to hit $1M ARR in 16 days.

Despite their early success, ElevenLabs is only getting started with mobile. Their strategy is clear: build where creators are, grow with consumers, move fast with small teams, and keep engineers focused on the work that differentiates the product—not the infrastructure that slows it down.Are you a product-first mobile developer looking to pioneer the future of voice AI? Get started with ElevenLabs’ Voice Agent Mobile SDKs for Voice Agents. And ElevenLabs is hiring.