StreamElements

After spending a long time digging into the history of StreamElements, I came to one conclusion: in the end, the hardware companies won. They didn’t build the tools, and they didn’t spend years winning over streamers. They waited, and when the moment was right, they bought the audiences that StreamElements and Streamlabs had spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars building. The way I see it, the free tools were the bait and the streamers were the prize. The software companies paid for the bait, and the hardware companies walked away with the prize.

To be fair, it isn’t as simple as one side doing all the hard work. The money Logitech and Razer used to buy these companies came from years of designing and selling hardware, and that was hard work too. They just spent it at the right time, on something someone else had already built.

Don’t worry if you’re a little lost right now. The chapters below start from the very beginning and walk through how it all happened.

In 2016, most streamers needed three or four different tools just to run one stream. Streamlabs, which had just changed its name from TwitchAlerts that year, handled the on-screen alerts. Nightbot or Moobot took care of chat moderation and chat commands. TipeeeStream or Gamewisp let viewers send tips so streamers could earn money. And if streamers wanted their stream to look nice, they used to hire designers on Fiverr to make custom overlays. Running all of this was not easy on the computer, either. Every Streamlabs feature, whether it was alerts, chat, or donation goals, had to be added to OBS as its own separate browser source, and each one used up more processing power.

Cloud-based overlays did exist at the time. One of the earliest companies to offer them was Strexm. It gave streamers a simple drag-and-drop editor for building overlays, along with a large library of ready-made themes for popular games like Overwatch, League of Legends, and Doom. By 2016, more than 150,000 people were using it.

Later that year, on September 28, Strexm was bought by SplitmediaLabs, the company that makes the streaming software XSplit. This was part of a bigger buying spree. Just two months earlier, on July 14, SplitmediaLabs had also bought Player.me and Challonge. After the deal, Strexm became part of the XSplit and Player.me family of products.

That same year, a new company called StreamElements was founded in Tel Aviv, Israel. It was started by Or Perry, Doron Nir, and Gil Hirsch. This is the company whose journey we are going to follow, to see whether its story could have turned out differently.

StreamElements opened to the public around mid 2017. Its pitch was simple: an all-in-one toolkit that lived in the cloud. It stood out from other companies in four main ways.

1. Everything ran through one browser source. The whole overlay was hosted on StreamElements’ own servers and loaded through a single link. That meant OBS only had to run one browser source instead of five or six, which put much less strain on the streamer’s computer. This was a direct shot at Streamlabs, where every widget needed its own separate source.

2. It gave power users real control. Earlier cloud overlay tools like Strexm were built mostly around ready-made templates. Strexm’s editor did allow a fair amount of customization, but StreamElements went a step further. Along with a drag-and-drop editor, it let streamers paste their own HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code straight into it. Designers and coders could now build fully custom widgets that moved and reacted to what was happening on stream.

3. The chatbot was built in. Instead of sending streamers off to use Nightbot or Moobot, StreamElements put its own chatbot in the same dashboard as the overlays, alerts, and tipping. It could handle chat commands, moderation, spam filters, timed messages, song requests, and custom counters. Streamers only needed one login for everything.

4. Premium themes were completely free. Other companies charged for good-looking overlays or left streamers paying Fiverr designers. StreamElements had professional motion designers create hundreds of animated overlay packs and gave all of them away. Even a brand-new streamer could have a professional look on day one without paying anything.

Let’s start with Streamlabs. In January 2018, it released Streamlabs OBS, an all-in-one desktop app that was still in beta at the time. It was Streamlabs’ answer to the problem of too many separate tools. The app was built from the same code as OBS Studio, but with a friendlier design and Streamlabs’ alerts, widgets, and themes built right in. But it was a program installed on the streamer’s computer rather than a service running in the cloud, and it asked streamers to switch away from the regular OBS they were already using.

Meanwhile, Strexm, which offered cloud-based overlays much like StreamElements’ own, was shutting down. When SplitmediaLabs bought it in 2016, it never planned to run Strexm as a separate product forever. The goal was to build one connected platform for gamers, with Player.me at the center and Strexm, XSplit, and the tournament site Challonge as pieces of it. So for a while, Strexm kept running on its own while its overlay technology was built into the new Player.me app. By early 2018, that work was mostly done, so Strexm was shut down and its users were moved over to Player.me. But the competition didn’t disappear. In August 2018, Player.me relaunched as an all-in-one streaming app with overlays, alerts, tipping, and chat built in, putting it in more direct competition with StreamElements than Strexm had ever been. Like Streamlabs OBS, it asked streamers to broadcast through its own app.

There were also smaller competitors. Muxy was popular with more tech-savvy streamers because of its analytics and tools for developers, though it later shifted its focus to Twitch extensions. StreamJar, based in the UK, offered tipping and alerts but stayed a small, niche player. Neither of them offered the full set of tools in one place the way StreamElements did.

While Streamlabs and Player.me wanted streamers to move into their apps, StreamElements took the opposite path. Rather than building its own streaming software, it went to where streamers already were. Late in 2018, it released OBS.Live, a plugin that placed StreamElements’ activity feed, chat, and controls right inside OBS Studio. (The plugin was renamed SE.Live in 2019.) The message was clear: if you liked OBS and didn’t want to switch, StreamElements was the company for you. It also kept expanding in other directions that year. In April, it launched on YouTube Live, reaching beyond Twitch for the first time. In October, it added credit card tipping through SE.Pay, on top of the PayPal tipping it already offered. And brand deals became a real part of the business, with campaigns for companies like Red Bull, Warner Bros., and Trojan.

By the end of 2018, StreamElements’ user base had grown by more than 600% in a single year, and it had delivered $15 million in tips to streamers, plus around $1 million through brand sponsorships.

All of these numbers sound impressive, but none of them show what StreamElements itself was earning. StreamElements is a private company, so I don’t have its actual numbers. But when you look closer, there are signs it wasn’t earning much at all.

• Tips were by far the biggest flow of money on the platform, yet StreamElements earned nothing from them. The company took no cut of tips, and all the fees went directly to its payment processor.
• Its core tools were free too. Overlays, alerts, the chatbot, and the entire theme library cost streamers nothing, and there was no paid subscription or premium tier. That meant no steady income from its own users.
• Brand deals were the one clear way StreamElements could earn money. Brands paid StreamElements, which passed most of that money on to streamers and kept a cut for itself. But the $1 million it reported was what streamers received, and the company never said how big its own cut was. Even a healthy share of deals on that scale was a small amount for a company serving hundreds of thousands of channels.
• Then there’s how the company talked about money. In January 2019, StreamElements raised $11.3 million in Series A funding, which we’ll look at in the next section. The key point here is that the announcement said nothing about how much StreamElements itself was earning. Companies with strong revenue usually like to show it off, so I read that silence as a sign there wasn’t much to show yet.

So the question I kept coming back to was simple.

Put together, these clues point to one answer. In its early years, StreamElements was running mostly on investors’ money. That money is what let it give almost everything away for free. It was a bet: win the market first, and figure out how to earn from it later. Plenty of startups make that bet, and some win big. But it only works if the users arrive before the money runs out.

In January 2019, StreamElements announced it had raised $11.3 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Pitango Venture Capital, and its early investors, State of Mind Ventures, Rainfall VC, and Samsung Next, put in money again.

My answer is that investors weren’t buying profit. They were buying a crowd.

StreamElements had brought around 200,000 streamers onto its tools, and through their streams, it reached a huge number of viewers. Investors thought that once you have an audience that big, there are many ways to make money from it. I think their pitch to investors would have sounded something like this:

• Streaming is a growing market, and we sit between the audience and the brands. We have the crowd, so if a brand wants to market its product to these viewers in the future, it will notice our crowd and come to us because of it.

• We have already made money from brand sponsorships, but the amounts are still small because our sales team is small. With this new money, we will grow our brand partnerships team. More salespeople means more sponsorship deals, and the business grows.

Put together, the story is easy to follow: Streaming is growing, and we have the crowd brands want. We’ve already made some money from it. Now we need more people to sell it. That’s why I don’t think investors were betting on StreamElements’ revenue in 2019. They were betting on its position, sitting on top of a huge and growing crowd, and on the idea that whoever had the crowd would eventually find the money.

Streamlabs was also a private company, so it never published its numbers either. Its main product was free, and for years it took no cut of tips. Between April and June 2018 alone, it handled $36.7 million in tips, and all of that money went to streamers. Real sources of income only came later: an app store and a merch store in 2018, then a paid subscription called Prime in 2019. Over five years, Streamlabs raised just $17.3 million in total. Put together, these clues suggest it was almost certainly losing money from 2014 to 2017, and at best was roughly breaking even by 2018 and 2019.

So when Logitech came to buy Streamlabs in late 2019, it was looking at an odd kind of company: 15 million users, but very little revenue.

Logitech could see two different things in that.

1. An audience. Logitech sells webcams, headsets, microphones, keyboards, and mice, and every streamer needs exactly that kind of gear. Imagine a “buy Logitech G” button inside software that many Twitch streamers open every day. That’s a sales channel worth real money, even if Streamlabs itself never earns a dollar.

2. A software business, and to Logitech, that part was still unproven. A free tool with low revenue is something you keep paying for, not something that pays you back.

My view is that Logitech was happy to pay for the first but not for the second, at least not upfront. The founders, after five years of work, surely wanted to be paid for both. The deal was built to close that gap.

First came the part Logitech was sure about. Streamlabs got $89 million in cash right away. That money paid for the audience: the users, the brand, the daily screen time, and the chance to sell them hardware. For a company Logitech’s size, this was closer to a marketing cost than a big gamble. In its first quarter under Logitech, Streamlabs brought in $4.1 million, less than 1% of Logitech’s total revenue.

Then came the part Logitech doubted. On top of the cash, the founders could earn up to $29 million more in Logitech stock, but only if Streamlabs hit certain revenue targets between January and June 2020. Those targets were based on Streamlabs’ own revenue, not on how many Logitech headsets it helped sell. In effect, Logitech was saying: “We’ll pay the rest of what you’re asking, but only if you prove the business is real.” Its own filings show how little it expected that to happen. On the day the deal was signed, Logitech valued the extra $29 million at almost zero.

Why would the founders accept such a tough condition? It only made sense if they had a quick way to bring in revenue. I think that’s where Prime comes in. It launched in the second half of 2019, right before the deal, and it gave Streamlabs something to point at and say, “This is how our users turn into money.” Prime was the founders’ proof. The revenue target was Logitech’s test.

Then, in March 2020, right in the middle of that test, COVID hit. Millions of people stuck at home started streaming. Prime subscriptions jumped, and Streamlabs hit its targets. In late 2020, Logitech paid the full $29 million in stock.

In 2020, COVID-19 lockdowns sent live streaming into overdrive. Across Twitch, YouTube Gaming, and Facebook Gaming, viewers watched 27.9 billion hours of streams that year, up 78% from 15.6 billion hours in 2019, according to Streamlabs and Stream Hatchet. Millions of people started streaming for the first time.

Many of these new streamers weren’t gamers at all. They were podcasters, musicians, talk show hosts, teachers, and even corporate teams. For someone who just wanted to run an online interview, OBS plus StreamElements was far too complicated. These new streamers wanted something simpler, and a new kind of tool was ready for them.

StreamYard, founded in 2018 without any outside investment, ran entirely in the web browser. It came with built-in overlays and banners, and there was no need for OBS at all. In 2020 alone, its revenue jumped from about $1 million to $30 million, and it reached 100,000 paying customers. Restream, a service that let people stream to more than 30 platforms at once, also built its own browser-based tool around this time, called Restream Studio. It came with overlays, alerts, and chat, cutting out both OBS and StreamElements.

This changed what competition looked like. In 2017, StreamElements was competing with other add-ons like Streamlabs, Strexm, and Nightbot for a spot inside OBS. By 2020, it was competing with cloud studios like StreamYard and Restream, and all-in-one apps like Streamlabs OBS, which were all trying to get rid of OBS completely.

StreamElements, though, stayed focused on gamers. And during the boom, that group grew fast too. I think there were two main reasons so many of them chose StreamElements.

The first reason was OBS Studio. StreamElements was built as an add-on for OBS, and OBS was where almost every new gamer ended up. Browser-based streaming tools couldn’t handle what gamers needed. They couldn’t stream games in high quality like 1080p at 60 frames per second, capture a specific game window, or manage more advanced audio setups. So every gamer who started streaming during lockdown downloaded OBS first, and then almost immediately went looking for alerts, overlays, and a chatbot to add to it. StreamElements was the free, all-in-one answer. It didn’t really have to go out and win these new users. OBS sent them straight to its door.

The second reason was SE.Live, the plugin that started as OBS.Live in 2018 and was renamed in 2019. It put StreamElements’ chat, activity feed, and controls directly inside OBS, so streamers got an all-in-one setup without giving up the stability and low CPU usage of the official OBS app.

The boom that started during the pandemic kept going into 2021. In January, Twitch passed 2 billion hours watched in a single month. By September, StreamElements said more than 1.1 million creators were using its tools across Twitch, YouTube, Facebook Gaming, and Trovo. That was more than 233% growth since the lockdowns began in March 2020, and the company said it had helped creators earn over $100 million in total. This was the peak of the creator economy boom, and StreamElements raised money right at the top of it.

On September 22, 2021, StreamElements announced a $100 million Series B round. It was led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, with PayPal Ventures, MoreTech, and its existing investors also taking part. This brought its total funding to around $111 million, according to PitchBook. The company didn’t share its valuation. Nahoko Hoshino from SoftBank joined the board. StreamElements said it would use the money to grow faster, build new tools to help creators produce content, engage their audiences, and earn money on both live streams and regular videos, and expand to more platforms like Trovo and YouTube.

But a $100 million check comes with bigger expectations. StreamElements had already won its position. Now investors wanted to see it turn into money. The leadership changes pointed the same way. Co-founder Gil Hirsch became CEO, and Doron Nir moved into the role of president. The company also brought in Yuval Tal as COO, Jason Krebs as chief business officer, and Udi Hoffmann as CFO. To me, bringing in a CFO and a chief business officer right after raising $100 million sends a clear signal. The focus was shifting from winning more users to making money from the ones it already had.

There was also a bigger change in direction. As lockdowns eased through 2021, industry data showed live streaming growth starting to slow. StreamElements’ main market, live PC gaming on Twitch, was beginning to mature. So Hirsch looked elsewhere. He pointed to YouTube’s 40 million active gaming channels, most of which posted regular videos rather than live streams and had none of the engagement tools StreamElements offered. The plan was to take everything that worked in live streaming, the overlays, alerts, and sponsorships, and bring it to regular video, where the audience was bigger and StreamElements had no presence yet.

Its first big move after the funding came on October 1, 2021, when StreamElements bought Paragon. Paragon was a YouTube network for gaming creators, with names like SypherPK, xNestorio, and Kiingtong, plus hundreds of others, and its channels had pulled in over a billion views that year. The price wasn’t made public. StreamElements also announced a new deal for these creators: it would no longer take the usual network commission on their regular ad revenue. This was the same approach it had used from the start, keep things free for the creator and make money from brands, now applied to YouTube. In simple terms, Paragon gave StreamElements a ready-made group of YouTube creators it could sell sponsorships around, and sponsorships are where StreamElements actually makes its money.

The competition was moving too. In January 2021, Hopin bought StreamYard for $250 million. That confirmed that the non-gamer, browser-based streaming market was a separate and very valuable space. Neither StreamYard nor Streamlabs followed StreamElements into regular YouTube videos.

Once the lockdowns ended, people went back to offices, schools, gyms, and bars. Streaming didn’t collapse, but it stopped growing. Twitch viewing hours leveled off and then started to dip, and new streamers were no longer signing up at pandemic speed. Then, in 2022, a second problem hit. Interest rates went up, tech stocks crashed, and companies everywhere cut back on advertising.

That second problem is the one that really hurt StreamElements. The whole strategy was built on one idea: the tools are free, streamers are not the customer, and brands are. StreamElements made money when a brand paid to put its product on a streamer’s screen. That meant almost all of its income came from advertising. So when brands cut their ad budgets in 2022, StreamElements’ revenue dropped with them, while its costs stayed the same. It still had over 200 salaries to pay and servers to run for 1.1 million free users. That’s why its first round of layoffs came just nine months after it raised $100 million.

This raises a fair question.

The answer is that it had built a few, but none of them were big enough.

• Tipping brought in nothing. According to the company, StreamElements never took a cut of tips, and all of the fees went straight to its payment processor.
• The merch store earned a small cut on t-shirts and other items, which was tiny money.
• Paragon, the YouTube network it bought in October 2021, didn’t bring in much either. Right after buying it, StreamElements removed the commission on creators’ ad revenue, which is the main way networks like Paragon make money in the first place. It did this to attract creators, so Paragon ended up working more as a pipeline for sponsorships than as a source of revenue.
• Newer sponsorship products, like those through Twitch’s partnership program and YouTube Shorts, only came from 2023 onward, which was too late to help in 2022.

That left sponsorships as the only real money-maker, and that was exactly the part hit by the ad crash. There was also a quality problem. Former employees complained that many of the sponsorships on offer were mobile game ads that creators didn’t want to run, and that leadership believed the answer was simply to sell them harder. In simple terms, the one product that made money wasn’t something streamers wanted more of.

What StreamElements never did was the thing Streamlabs did back in 2019: charge the streamer. There was no Prime-style subscription, no paid overlay tier, and no fees. “Everything is free” was the company’s whole identity. In a way, StreamElements was trapped by its own strategy. Being free is what made it huge, but it also left the company with very few options when the crisis hit.

Building new revenue takes years, and the ad market had already crashed. Cutting salaries is the only thing that lowers spending right away. Many tech companies in Israel, including other SoftBank-backed ones, were doing the same thing in 2022. StreamElements described it as “building a route to profitability.” In startup language, that usually means: “Our investors aren’t going to hand us another $100 million, so we need to make the money we have last.”

Nobody seems to have said it publicly. But the warning signs were out in the open. Viewers on Twitch watched 11% fewer hours in Q3 2021 than in Q2. Streamers were pulling back even earlier: by Q3, they were broadcasting 15.9% fewer hours than at their peak in Q1 2021, the biggest drop in Twitch’s history. And streamers were StreamElements’ core users, so this was its own market starting to shrink. Then, right after raising money in September 2021, StreamElements started moving toward regular YouTube videos. That’s usually what a company does when it knows its main market is starting to mature. So I think the signs were there to see.

What StreamElements didn’t do was prepare for it. Instead of playing it safe, it went bigger. It grew to over 200 employees, bought Paragon, and expanded into Trovo and regular video. Every one of those moves was paid for by the same single source of income: sponsorships.

My read is that the company was too idealistic, and the $100 million from SoftBank made it worse. With that much money in the bank, expanding felt like the safe choice, and building a second way to make money felt unnecessary. So StreamElements walked into 2022 with pandemic-sized costs, only one real source of income, and no backup plan. In the end, the layoffs that started in June 2022 became the backup plan.

That leads to the obvious question:

Nobody from the company has ever explained this in a public interview, so what follows is my own interpretation.

1. Identity and pride. “We’re the free one” was StreamElements’ whole founding story. Charging would have meant admitting the model didn’t work.

2. Fear of backlash. StreamElements had watched how quickly the streaming community could turn on a company. In 2021, the OBS naming dispute brought a wave of public anger against Streamlabs, with big streamers threatening a boycott. Putting a price tag on tools that had always been free could have triggered the same kind of reaction.

3. It might not have worked anyway. By then, overlays and alerts had become basic tools that anyone could get. Streamlabs already sold a paid version, and Twitch offered its own built-in alerts for free. If StreamElements had started charging in 2023, many users would likely have simply switched.

Could brands reach streamers without StreamElements? Yes, and they always could. StreamElements was never a gatekeeper. It was one of several middlemen standing between brands and streamers.

Brands had plenty of other ways in. The simplest was direct outreach, where a brand or its agency emails or messages a streamer. This is how most big deals with top creators happen, usually through talent agencies like Loaded or Night that represent streamers. Then there were the platforms themselves. Twitch launched Bounty Board in 2018, which connected streamers directly with brands, with Twitch handling the relationship and the payments. Many saw it as a way to cut out third-party agencies. YouTube has a similar program called BrandConnect. On top of that, other marketplaces like PowerSpike offered the same kind of matchmaking.

So what was StreamElements actually selling? In a word, convenience at scale. A brand that wanted 5,000 small streamers to show its banner for two weeks couldn’t email 5,000 people. StreamElements offered one dashboard that handled placing the overlays, tracking results, and paying everyone. That’s real value, but it’s thin value. Brands could go direct for big creators, and platforms like Twitch already had their own tools for small ones, which they could grow anytime.

In February 2025, Twitch added a sponsorships tab to streamers’ dashboards. StreamElements was the first outside company allowed in, and its sponsorship offers showed up right inside Twitch. On the surface, it looked like a big win. But Twitch wasn’t just making room for StreamElements. It was filling the same tab with its own tools. It launched Creator Profiles, which let brands find streamers directly. And it announced that its own sponsorship program, Bounty Board, would move into the same tab too. So StreamElements wasn’t the only road to sponsorships on Twitch. It was sitting right next to Twitch’s own tools, which did the same job. Twitch owned the dashboard, the streamers, and the relationship. StreamElements was a guest.

By early 2026, StreamElements’ money problems were impossible to hide. On January 29, 2026, the company launched a crowdfunding campaign called “Keep It Live.” In a post signed by Or Perry, it said StreamElements had kept its tools completely free for over 10 years for more than 23 million creators, and reminded users that every stream, alert, chatbot, and tip page runs on real servers. It asked anyone who had benefited from those tools to contribute. Specifically, Perry asked the community to help cover roughly $300,000 in monthly server costs.

The campaign barely made a dent. Write-ups tracking it showed only about $1,700 to a little over $2,000 raised, from roughly 75 to 80 supporters. For a company that had once raised $100 million in a single round, it was a painful result.

In May, things got worse. On May 14, a StreamElements employee told some of the company’s creator clients that it was preparing to close its doors. The staff member urged creators to log in and save their assets while they still could, and promised they would be fully paid for any current sponsorship deals. Around the same time, reports noted that StreamElements’ sponsorship dashboard had been emptied entirely, with no active campaigns listed. For a company whose only real income came from sponsorships, that was a very bad sign.

Management moved quickly to calm things down. StreamElements said it was in talks with a partner that shared its focus on creators and the community, and GamesBeat reported that at least two possible buyers had held talks with the company. Then, on May 21, Perry said plainly that the platform was not shutting down, and that funding had been secured to keep it running while the company worked with that partner.

But those few months raise a bigger question. StreamElements had millions of users, so why did so few of them step up when it needed help? Looking back, I think there are two clear reasons.

1. Leaving was easy, and there was somewhere to go. A StreamElements overlay is just a browser source link inside OBS, and replacing it takes an afternoon. The alternatives were good and also free: Streamlabs, Twitch’s own built-in alerts, and plenty of smaller bot and overlay tools all covered the basics. Streamlabs knew this. On May 14, 2026, the same day the shutdown news started spreading, it published a guide showing StreamElements users how to move their overlays, chatbot settings, loyalty points, and tip settings over to Streamlabs using its own import tool. Loyalty rarely survives when a product is this easy to replace.

2. There was never any money between them. StreamElements was free and took no cut of tips, so streamers never paid it anything. There was no habit of paying and no feeling of “my subscription keeps this alive.”

To me, this all points to one thing. StreamElements never built an emotional connection with its users. It became a utility, something you use every day and never think about. But I think there’s something deeper going on too. For ten years, StreamElements told streamers that its tools were free and always would be. That message worked so well that people stopped seeing the tools as something a company was paying to run. They saw them the way you’d see a public park or a free Wi-Fi network: something that just exists. So when StreamElements finally asked for help, it was asking for money from the same people it had told for ten years they would never have to pay. In a way, the company had trained its own users not to care, and it worked.

Has crowdfunding ever saved a company in a situation like this? Rarely, and the times it did work looked nothing like StreamElements.

There are a few real success stories. In 2002, the company behind the 3D software Blender went bankrupt. Its community raised about 100,000 euros in just seven weeks to buy the source code and make it free and open source. Today, Blender is one of the most widely used 3D tools in the world. In 2014, OpenBSD, a free operating system project, nearly shut down because it couldn’t pay about $20,000 in electricity bills, and donations saved it. And some well-known projects, like Wikipedia, Signal, and the Internet Archive, rely on donations to keep running year after year.

There are also plenty of failures. In 2024, Cohost, a small social media platform, tried to survive on support from its users and shut down when the money ran out. Back in 2010, Diaspora raised around $200,000 on Kickstarter to build an alternative to Facebook. It launched, but it never caught on and slowly faded.

When I look at these examples side by side, I first assumed StreamElements’ ask was simply too big. But that doesn’t hold up. Wikipedia raises about 50 times more money every year than StreamElements was asking for. If StreamElements’ users had given like Wikipedia’s donors, at around $10 each, it would have needed about 360,000 donations a year, or roughly 1 in 7 of its daily users giving once a year. Instead, only about 75 to 80 people gave anything. So the cost wasn’t the real problem. The real question is who pays, and why.

Projects that survive on donations usually do it in one of two ways. Some, like Wikipedia, are funded by millions of ordinary people giving small amounts, around $10 each. Others, like Signal, are kept alive by one wealthy backer who believes in the mission, in Signal’s case WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton.

StreamElements had none of this. Its users gave only about $2,000 in total, and no wealthy backer stepped in to save it out of belief in the mission. It was a private company that had raised over $100 million from investors, so any donation would ultimately be helping a business, not a public cause. On top of that, it had spent ten years promising users they would never have to pay, so there was no habit of giving to fall back on. The only big backer who finally showed up was Razer, and it didn’t come as a donor. It came as a buyer, because it saw a business opportunity. In my view, the campaign was never going to work. But it was worth a try anyways.

On July 31, 2026, gaming hardware giant Razer announced it had bought StreamElements. It wasn’t a normal company purchase, though. Razer bought the operating assets of StreamElements from Live Momentum Ltd., the company that had owned and run it. In simple terms, Razer bought the parts of the business that worked, like the technology, the cloud servers, and the user base, but not the old problems. Anything StreamElements owed from before the sale, including unpaid sponsorship money owed to creators, stayed Live Momentum’s responsibility. Even so, part of the money Razer paid was set aside to cover what Live Momentum still owed creators. I think Razer did this because it didn’t want its new product to start with creators still waiting for their money, which would have hurt its reputation from day one. In the end, the deal saved StreamElements from shutting down.

To understand why Razer wanted StreamElements, it helps to look back at Logitech and Streamlabs. In fiscal year 2021, which ran from April 2020 to March 2021, Logitech’s gaming sales grew 79.5% to $1.24 billion. Logitech never said exactly how much of that came from Streamlabs. Its filings do show that Streamlabs’ own revenue was counted inside the Gaming category, and they named Streamlabs services as one of the things driving that growth. But I think Streamlabs’ real value went beyond its own revenue. It put Logitech’s brand in front of millions of streamers at the exact moment they were setting up a stream and deciding what gear to buy.

The best evidence that Logitech saw a return is that it kept investing. In July 2023, it bought Loupedeck, a maker of control consoles for creators, and said the deal would allow tighter integration between Loupedeck’s devices and the Streamlabs apps and services. A company doesn’t keep investing in a channel that shows nothing. To me, this shows the Logitech model paid off, and it explains why Razer wanted StreamElements.

In 2026, Razer followed the same path. After the deal, Razer said StreamElements would stay open to all creators, not just those using Razer products, but that it would start offering optional Razer-specific perks, like hardware discounts and sponsored campaigns for Razer products. That’s the Logitech playbook: own the software streamers use every day, and use it to put your hardware in front of them.

I think it could have. But before I explain how, I need to set some rules, because hindsight makes any advice look easy. Anyone can look back from 2026 and say “they should have seen it coming.”

So every idea below follows three things.

1. It was standard practice between 2019 and 2021.
2. At least one competitor was already doing it at the time.
3. None of it required knowing the future.

With those rules in place, the first missed chance goes all the way back to 2019.

1. Find a hardware partner while it was strong (2019 or 2021)

When Logitech bought Streamlabs in September 2019, it left StreamElements in a rare spot. It had just raised $11.3 million, it was running on 200,000 channels, and its user base had grown more than 600% in a year. Most importantly, it was now one of the best assets still unclaimed. Razer, HyperX, and ASUS had all just watched a rival buy its way into creators’ software.

StreamElements could have invited all three to the table with a pitch built around its reach. It could have offered to show a partner’s logo on streams by default, or to run campaigns that rewarded viewers with discounts on gear for hitting gaming milestones. Then it could have compared the offers and picked the deal it liked best: a strategic investment, a co-branded partnership, or a revenue-sharing deal. That kind of leverage rarely lasts long, and it almost never comes twice.

For StreamElements, it did. In 2021, the company raised $100 million and was serving 1.1 million creators. It was bigger, better funded, and harder to ignore than it had been two years earlier.

Both times, it chose to stay alone.

In 2026, the story came full circle in the worst way. Razer bought StreamElements after all. But this time, StreamElements wasn’t a rising star. It was a distressed asset. The buyer was the same one StreamElements could have courted in 2019. The only difference was who held the power.

2. Build the simple studio for non-gamers in 2019, before the boom

By 2019, live streaming was spreading beyond gaming. Podcasters, marketers, and small businesses wanted to go live too, but tools like OBS were built for gamers and felt too complex for them.

StreamYard saw this gap. Founded in 2018 with no outside funding, it sold a simple studio that ran entirely in the browser. By the end of 2019, it was making about $1 million in revenue.

StreamElements was in a better position to build the same thing. It had $11.3 million in fresh funding, and its own reports showed non-gaming content was the fastest-growing part of Twitch all through 2019. Instead, it chose to go deeper into the gamer market it already led.

By the end of 2020, StreamYard was making over $30 million a year. If StreamElements had built something for non-gaming creators in 2019, it would have been there to take a share of that growth.

Not to mention, non-gaming creators would have opened the door to a completely different set of sponsors, like software companies, banks, insurance providers, and VPNs, which were already spending heavily on podcasts. A wider mix of sponsors could have softened the blow when its main sponsor markets shrank after Covid.

The pandemic didn’t create this opportunity. It was already there in 2019. The pandemic only decided how expensive it was to miss.

3. Charge the brand side as software, not just as a marketplace

Sponsorships weren’t a bad business. The problem was that StreamElements only got paid when a brand decided to spend. From 2022, brands started cutting back, and StreamElements’ revenue fell with them.

But the tools StreamElements used to run those campaigns were valuable on their own: the sponsorship dashboard, the campaign tracking, and the creator search. Agencies, game publishers, and tournament organizers would pay a monthly fee to use them, whether or not they were running a campaign that month. That is B2B software, the kind businesses subscribe to. It keeps the tools free for creators, and it brings in recurring revenue that doesn’t collapse the moment ad budgets shrink.

4. Take a small margin on money moving through SE.Pay (2019 onward)

In October 2018, StreamElements launched SE.Pay, its own tipping service. It let viewers tip by credit card and covered 100% of streamers’ chargeback fees. But StreamElements took no cut. Its own blog said every fee went straight to its payment processor.

StreamElements already made money from sponsorships and merch. Tips were the one money flow it left completely free. Since SE.Pay ran through StreamElements itself, it could have added a small fee, say 1%, on every tip. The tools would still be free, and the charge would only touch money moving through the system. SE.Pay already advertised the lowest processing fees in the industry, and PayPal charged 2.9% plus 30 cents at the time, so a 1% fee would likely still have left it competitive.

The risk was small. A 1% fee on a $10 tip is just 10 cents, and hardly anyone would leave a platform they use every day over 10 cents.

I couldn’t find any public figure for how much it processed after that. So the best number we have is an early one. By January 2019, streamers had received $15 million in tips through StreamElements. If those tips had run through SE.Pay, a 1% fee would have brought in $150,000, and that number was growing fast. On its own, that wouldn’t have saved the company. But when an opportunity is sitting right there, every dollar counts. You never know when you’ll need it.

5. Use its data to sell sponsorships, then sell the data itself (2019 onward)

StreamElements was sitting on some of the best data in live streaming. Its tools ran on hundreds of thousands of channels, and it regularly published State of the Stream, showing which games were trending and which streamers were pulling which audiences. It could have put that data to work in two ways.

1. Sell sponsorships smarter. Imagine walking into the publisher of the number two game in a genre and saying, “Here are the streamers who are pulling viewers away from your biggest rival.” That publisher now has a clear reason to book those streamers. Then take the same data to the number one publisher. Suddenly it has a reason to book them first, before its rival does. Now two publishers want the same streamers, and that starts a bidding war. Whoever pays more gets the streamers, and campaign prices go up.

2. Sell the data itself. State of the Stream was great free PR, but game publishers, agencies, and investors pay real money for this kind of market data. Stream Hatchet and Streams Charts built entire businesses on it.

Instead, StreamElements gave its data away for free, and I couldn’t find any public record of it trying either one. In the end, someone else saw the value.

6. Give the YouTube expansion its own money

When StreamElements bought Paragon in October 2021, it dropped the commission that YouTube networks normally take on creators’ ad revenue. The better move was to cut the commission, not kill it. Creators were already used to giving networks a share of their ad revenue; what they hated was networks taking too much. A much smaller cut would still have made StreamElements the most creator-friendly network around, and it would have given the YouTube business its own income from day one. That money came from YouTube’s thousands of advertisers, not from the same few brands paying for sponsorships. So if sponsors pulled back, StreamElements would still have had another source of money.

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None of these six ideas were new, and that’s the point. Each one was already being done by someone else at the time: Logitech with Streamlabs, StreamYard with its browser studio, Stream Hatchet with its data, and YouTube networks with their commissions.

Idea	When	Precedent at the time	What it would have changed
1. Find a hardware partner	2019 or 2021	Logitech with Streamlabs	A sale on its own terms, not as a distressed asset
2. Build a simple studio for non-gamers	2019	StreamYard	A share of the non-gamer boom, and a wider mix of sponsors
3. Sell the brand tools as software	2019–2021	B2B software subscriptions	Recurring revenue that doesn’t depend on ad budgets
4. Take 1% of SE.Pay tips	2019 onward	Payment processors, such as PayPal at 2.9% plus 30 cents	Small but growing income
5. Sell smarter with data, then sell the data	2019 onward	Stream Hatchet and Streams Charts	Higher sponsorship prices, and a data business
6. Keep a smaller YouTube commission	2021	YouTube networks	Income from YouTube’s advertisers, separate from sponsors

So yes, I think it could have survived. Maybe it still ends up with Razer, but as a partner, not a rescue. The answers were all around it. It just never picked them up.