The thesis is that ElevenLabs will Sherlock services which use them as a backend — therefore better use another backend.
How can I be sure they are not doing the same?
baghdasaryana · 19d ago
You can’t get a cryptographic guarantee, but you can look at three concrete signals:
Incentives.
ElevenLabs has VC-scale funding and a “own the whole voice stack” narrative to justify it. Moving up into agents grows their TAM. Async is tiny, margin-driven infra. If they jump into end-user agents they’d start competing with (and losing) their own customers. Wrong game theory.
Portability.
Their SDK is just a thin SSML/gRPC wrapper. It swaps out for Coqui / Azure / local models by changing an ENV var and rebuilding a Docker image. No proprietary DSL, no special voice-clone formats. Easy exits keep vendors honest.
Track record & roadmap.
ElevenLabs is already shipping agent UIs. Async’s public roadmap stops at “more voices + lower latency.” If they suddenly pivot up-stack, the diff will be obvious months in advance and you can unplug.
TL;DR: nobody’s bullet-proof, but Async’s incentives and architecture make rug-pulling a lot less rational—and a lot easier to escape from—than betting everything on ElevenLabs. Keep an abstraction layer and always have a second TTS plugged in; problem solved.
How can I be sure they are not doing the same?
Incentives.
Portability. Track record & roadmap. TL;DR: nobody’s bullet-proof, but Async’s incentives and architecture make rug-pulling a lot less rational—and a lot easier to escape from—than betting everything on ElevenLabs. Keep an abstraction layer and always have a second TTS plugged in; problem solved.