Rime brings expressive voice AI agents to life on Render, helping customers move faster

Challenge

As the only full-time engineer building out Rime’s hosted agent demos, Matthew Kim faced a tough tradeoff: spend weeks standing up EC2 infrastructure for a small set of real-time voice agents—or find a faster, simpler way to ship. With no dedicated DevOps team and limited time, AWS wasn’t viable.

Solution

Rime chose Render to host their voice agents. Render gave them full control over service configs, fast iteration with GitHub autodeploys, and a clear mental model for managing environments without having to write custom scripts or navigate complex cloud networking.

Result

Rime spun up their hosted agents in days, not weeks. Their engineers estimate Render reduced infrastructure complexity by 80% compared to AWS and eliminated the need for a dedicated DevOps engineer. Now the team can focus on building expressive, responsive voice experiences instead of managing agent infra.

Making voice agents feel real, without the infra burden

In the early days of Rime, there was one full-time engineer responsible for spinning up hosted voice agents that showcased the power of their product. Rime’s core API already lived on custom EC2 instances, but replicating that setup for demos wasn’t realistic.

“We weren’t building a full platform where customers deploy agents through us,” said Matthew Kim, head of engineering at Rime. “We just needed four agents for the homepage that demoed a full-stack experience: real-time audio streamed from the browser, back-and-forth interaction with an LLM agent, and Rime’s voice model responding live.”

Rather than spending weeks configuring EC2, Rime evaluated options like Fly.io and landed on Render. “It felt like something built by engineers who’d worked on internal DevOps platforms at big tech companies,” said Matthew. “You pick a repo, pick a service, hit deploy—it just made sense.”

With Render, Matthew was able to:

• Stand up voice agents on Render using containerized services in a single day
• Easily bump memory, manage redeploys, and run multiple agents per repo
• Keep environments cleanly separated without managing AWS networking or security groups
• Point the demo infrastructure to specific GitHub branches for fast iteration

“Render saved us at least three weeks of DevOps work. More importantly, it made the project possible in the first place. If I had to build all this on EC2, I probably would’ve told the team: I’m not doing this.”

Helping customers move faster and buy faster

Render didn’t just help Rime build faster internally—it made it easier for prospective customers to evaluate and adopt Rime’s voice models.

By embedding full-stack demos directly on their homepage, Rime enabled technical buyers to hear and interact with their models immediately, without cloning a repo or provisioning cloud infra. That approach shortened time-to-value and removed friction from the buying process.

A clean hierarchy that scales with the team

Today, Rime runs multiple voice agents on Render, including agents with more advanced customization. The team appreciates Render’s environment and service hierarchy, which makes it easy to:

• Run staging and production agents side-by-side
• Deploy alternate versions of agents from a single codebase
• Onboard new engineers without training them on DevOps or AWS

“Other platforms catering to startups don’t always get this right. If you don’t start with the right hierarchy—projects, services, environments—you end up creating multiple accounts just to keep things separate. Render’s structure makes it easy to grow.”

That structure also made onboarding a breeze as the team scaled. “Everybody I show Render to gets it right away. There’s no training required, and I don’t have to worry they’re going to mess it up—it’s all very clear,” said Matthew.

Render’s CLI and OpenTelemetry support have also impressed the team, even if they haven’t tapped into all the features yet. “It’s clear Render was designed to scale. It supports the basics well, and the advanced use cases are there when we need them,” said Michael Cullan, another fullstack engineer at Rime.

Why Rime recommends Render

For startups evaluating whether to build on AWS or a platform like Render, Rime’s advice is clear: “Render gave us the flexibility of rolling our own infra, without the headaches of actually doing it,” said Matthew.

The team estimates Render reduced complexity by 80% vs. building from scratch on AWS and eliminated the need for a dedicated infra engineer. “It was like having a whole DevOps team in my back pocket,” said Matthew. “And the best part is—I don’t even think about it. It just works.”

Michael agreed and put it more bluntly:

“I love complaining about platforms. And I have nothing to complain about with Render. That’s rare.”

About Rime

Rime's lifelike Voice AI technology delivers ultra-natural, emotionally aware text-to-speech models, letting enterprises and startups build applications that convert, retain, and sell. With sub-200ms latency on the cloud (and <100ms on-prem) plus fine-grained voice controls, Rime is redefining how businesses engage with customers through voice.