Eero Rönkkö

Twilio is the absolute backbone of our most unique feature: allowing users to record family stories via a standard phone call. We chose them because of their unmatched reliability, global reach, and powerful APIs that made integrating traditional telephony with our modern AI stack incredibly straightforward.

We evaluated several text-to-speech and AI voice providers, but ElevenLabs was the clear winner for Sanota. Because our conversational AI acts as a gentle, empathetic interviewer for older relatives, having incredibly natural, lifelike, and emotionally resonant voices was absolutely critical to making the experience feel human.

We chose Replit because we needed a platform that allows incredibly fast iteration and deployment. Building Sanota directly in the browser meant we could go from a raw idea to a fully functional product without worrying about complex infrastructure or local environment setups. It simply let us focus entirely on shipping.

When it comes to handling subscriptions and payments, reliability and developer experience are everything. We chose Stripe over the alternatives because their documentation is flawless, the integration process is incredibly smooth, and it provides our users with a highly secure, trustworthy checkout experience without any hassle.