Free trial abuse has become a serious financial problem for AI companies because software now carries real compute costs, and Stripe built an ML pipeline that lets companies like Eleven Labs block thousands of abusers per day.

2:22know hundreds and thousands of features below that but again the framework work we think about is really reducing frictions and increasing agency. So a good example last year uh we saw a lot of users for the first time experiencing free trial abuse and this wasn't really an issue pre- AI because >> you know most stripe users are software companies margins burden wasn't there yet. >> Yeah. So they're wasting a little

2:48compute but but it's it's it's it's negligible. It's minimous but now software has a cost structure and so actually I think cursor was the first user that we >> I was going to say it was our portfolio where we exactly experienced it and uh you know I I guess internet users can be crafty but yes >> yes and and I think it was something like one in six users of free trials

3:12were abusive um >> and so you know you're just throwing money at these you know users who are just signing up for another account, another account, another account, you know, maybe even doing model distillation and and and things like that. And so we sort of, you know, got in the bunker with them and just stood up in a weekend a pipeline where we were able to, you know, use our foundation

3:33model, look across the entire Stripe network, use our embeddings, and then, you know, after that put a reasoning layer on top of so you could sort of say we think this is a free trial abuser because um and point to those signals. And I I I I think it's today, I think it's 11 labs recently told us that they're blocking 2,000 free trial abusers per day using

3:56stripe signals. >> Incredible. >> So, you just think about how much money you'd be, you know, burning if you were um you know, well, how much money you wouldn't how how much revenue you wouldn't be creating if you weren't giving these trials, you know, how false positives and the false Yeah, exactly. Exactly. >> And then on the increasing agency side, >> it's still just so hard to go global.

4:15you know, you think about um having to register, calculate, remmit taxes in so many geographies >> and this new crop of AI companies, you know, they're digital goods companies and they want to just, you know, go global very fast. And so I guess, you know, AEFs is a good example. um they're using uh this product strike managed payments where in their home markets you know the US let's say they have an

4:39entity in Europe they are the seller of record but you know in longtail markets you know the Kazakhstans and you know all over um APAC uh where they you know haven't sort of entities you know stripe stands in as the actual merchant of record we handle all tax calculation tax remittance and everything like that and so this just lets them cover you know 100 plus geographies and compliantly.