Growing an audience
Running the business
Both cover tips & donations and monetization & payments. Here is what separates them on price, billing, what you can take with you, and coverage.
| Buy Me a Coffee | StreamElements | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | Free | Free |
| Pricing model | Free | Free |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Billing | Usage-based | One-time purchase |
| Free trial | Not stated | None |
| API | Not stated | Not stated |
| Data export | Not stated | Not stated |
| Their cut | 5% of what you earn | Not stated |
| Runs on | Not stated | Web |
| Covers | Tips & Donations, Digital Products & Storefronts, Memberships & Subscriptions, Monetization & Payments | Tips & Donations, Live Streaming, Monetization & Payments |
| Works with | Nothing in particular | YouTube, Twitch |
| Founded | Not listed | Not listed |
| Reader rating | No reviews yet | No reviews yet |
| Live deals | None right now | None right now |
One page for tips, memberships and sales
Buy Me a Coffee is the shortest path between a reader wanting to pay you and money arriving in your bank account. A page, a button, and no plan to choose. Memberships and a shop for one-off things sit on the same page, and the 5 percent it takes is cheap until you are earning enough that a percentage stops being cheap.
Our note
The right first step and rarely the last one. Once memberships pass a few hundred a month, run the 5 percent against what a fixed monthly plan elsewhere would cost, because that is when the simplicity starts having a price.
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Overlays, alerts and a chatbot, all free
StreamElements is the layer over a stream: alerts when somebody follows, overlays built in a visual editor, a chat bot with commands and loyalty points, and a tipping page. All of it is free with no tier above it, because the business is sponsorships rather than subscriptions. Most streams running something other than plain OBS are running this or its one real rival.
Our note
StreamElements and Streamlabs are the two, they do much the same job, and this is the one that has never charged for it. Set it up alongside OBS rather than instead of it.
Ratings are the average of reviews readers left. The facts are stated by each tool’s own listing and are not verified by CloutStack. How we make money.
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