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 | Streamlabs | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | Free | From $19 |
| Pricing model | Free | Free plan, paid tiers |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Billing | Usage-based | Not stated |
| Free trial | Not stated | Not stated |
| API | Not stated | Not stated |
| Data export | Not stated | Not stated |
| Their cut | 5% of what you earn | Not stated |
| Runs on | Not stated | macOS, Windows, iOS, Android |
| Covers | Tips & Donations, Digital Products & Storefronts, Memberships & Subscriptions, Monetization & Payments | Live Streaming, Monetization & Payments, Tips & Donations |
| 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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Streaming with alerts, overlays and tipping
Streamlabs wraps OBS in something friendlier and adds alerts, overlays and a donation page. Setup takes minutes rather than an evening. It is heavier on system resources than plain OBS.
Our note
Start free and stay there until a specific Ultra feature is blocking you. The resource cost against plain OBS is real, and on a mid-range machine it is the difference between a smooth stream and a stuttering one.
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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.