Including the awkward ones
If a question has an answer that makes us look bad, it is still on this page. A pricing page nobody believes is worth less than no pricing page at all.
You already pay, in ads. The only ad-free thing Twitch sells is a $5.99 a month subscription, per channel, recurring. Here a top-up is not monthly and does not expire — $5 is 100 hours of 1080p across every channel on the platform. The average viewer watches about 47 hours a month, which comes to $2.35.
We are not going to claim this beats free. It does not. It beats not watching ads, which is the thing you were already considering paying for.
5.00¢ an hour at 1080p60, 3.53¢ at 720p, 2.73¢ at 480p, 2.07¢ for audio only. You choose the quality and we never switch it for you. Dropping from 1080p to 480p takes a $5 top-up from 100 hours to 183 — about 83% more — and you will see the number jump when you do it.
On that rung, yes, and we would rather explain it than bury it. Two reasons. The fee is not a percentage of bandwidth — it covers what running the platform costs per viewer-hour, which is the same whether you are watching 1080p or listening to audio.
And the cheapest rung is doing a second job: the price of the cheapest rung is the price of a fake viewer. Priced at what audio actually costs to deliver, a fake viewer would cost essentially nothing and we would lose the one thing that makes this platform different. At 2.07¢ an hour, ten thousand fake viewers costs somebody $207 an hour. On Twitch it costs $0. That floor is deliberate, and it is why the numbers on this site are real.
No, and there is nothing recurring. It is a wallet, not a subscription — there is nothing to cancel.
Add $1 at a time. That is the honest answer. Because credits never expire there is no reason to stockpile, and a large balance buys you nothing a small one does not.
It is 10–15 seconds, the same range as Twitch with low-latency mode off. Going lower means holding an open connection per viewer at the edge, which is the expensive way to move video — the difference between 5¢ an hour and something nearer 13¢. We took the cheap path first because the whole point is that watching stays cheap. We will not publish a latency number until we have measured one.
Only if a creator chooses to run one, and they are always skippable. If you do watch one your meter pauses and half the ad money lands in your balance — the other half goes to the creator, and we take none of it.
Ad earnings can cover at most half of what you have spent, never more. That cap is deliberate: it is what stops someone farming ads with fake accounts, which is what keeps the viewer counts real.
No. Free to read and free to send. Spam is handled by rate limiting rather than by price.
Card processing is 2.9% + $0.30 on every payment however small. That is the card networks, not us, and we pass it through at cost rather than folding it into the price. Below $1 the fee would be most of what you paid, which would be a bad deal dressed up as a small one.
Because hiding it inside the price is how you end up unable to explain your own numbers. You always see two things: what the thing costs, and what was added on top. That rule applies to bandwidth, to card processing, and to us.
Playback drops to audio, which is the cheapest rung, and you can top up without losing your place. Nothing is deleted and nothing is charged retroactively.
Card details never touch our servers — Stripe holds them. We store what billing requires and nothing else, there are no third-party trackers on this site, and you can export or delete your data in the product rather than by emailing support.
Yes, on the default path, and not as a trial. Your video is remuxed, not re-encoded — the compressed video is never touched, only the container around it changes — which costs us about a fifth of a cent an hour. We make our money on the watching side, never on creators, on any path.
No. The default path is free, so there is nothing to bill. A payment method only appears when you turn on something that costs real money — extra qualities, or recording — and both are charged at exactly what they cost us.
Twitch has permitted simulcasting to any platform since October 2023, for Affiliates and Partners alike, with no revenue penalty. Two of their rules matter: your Twitch stream must be equal or better quality than what you send elsewhere, and you cannot put a link to another platform in chat, your title, or an overlay. A link in your About panel is explicitly allowed.
Stripe Connect, and you keep 100% of memberships and tips. The first 30 days of a new channel's earnings are held, then released in full — nothing forfeited and nothing to apply for. After that about 10% is held for 90–120 days, because card disputes can arrive that late. You can see the held balance and its release date the whole time.
The reason is card fraud: without a hold, someone can sign up, buy memberships to their own channel with stolen cards, and cash out before the chargebacks land. Every other platform blocks that with a partner programme — an application, follower counts, watch hours. We would rather not make you apply for anything, so the hold does that job instead.
You set it, and you keep all of it. We take 0%. No other platform does that — every one of them takes a cut of what your audience gives you, and we take none.
Minimum $2, it can recur monthly, and the price is yours — you can move it whenever you like and nobody else can change it. Everywhere else the tier is a fixed number set by the platform, and the platform can discount it without asking you. Here nothing sits between what you set and what you receive; the member covers card processing as its own line on top.
On the default path there is one video quality — yours — plus audio only, so someone on a bad connection drops to audio rather than to 480p. You can turn on extra qualities whenever you want; they cost 30¢ an hour, which is exactly what they cost us, and your viewers' margin covers even that at around 13 people watching.
Recording and clipping are here. Recording is paid for the moment it is written, at 1.50¢ a stream-hour kept a week, or 4.60¢ kept a month — which means a recording can never be deleted because a balance ran out. Clips are free. Emotes are not here yet.
This is a business and costs can move, so we are not going to promise a ceiling we might have to walk back. What we will say is the scale: the entire platform fee is 2¢ an hour, on every quality, and anything we would ever adjust lives inside that number.
What is promised is the structure — both line items always visible, every change logged with a date, and our providers' rate cards linked so you can check us. Not a value, and not a timeline.
Our fixed costs are about $60 a month and the pricing covers 100% of what gets used, so there is no scale we have to reach in order to survive and no funding round we can miss. That is checkable against the numbers on the pricing page.
Watching costs money, so botting costs money. Ten thousand fake viewers would carry ten thousand real bills. It is the one thing about this model that no free platform can copy without becoming a paid one.
No explicit content, no gambling, and no content involving bodily harm. Moderation is modelled on how Twitch handles it. Monetisation is open from your first stream; moderation is not.
This is version one and it is deliberately narrow. No emotes, no raids, and the feature list is short. Things arrive as the platform can support them, and the threshold we are building toward is roughly 100 concurrent viewers across the whole site.