How the money works

What a creator is paid, what we keep, and the arithmetic that decides both — with our own side of the ledger shown as well for transparency.

One number to hold

Seeds are spent by burning them: while people are watching you, your balance goes down. A viewer's player checks in every 30 seconds, and each check-in burns half a viewer-minute — 500 micro-seeds, an exact integer, so a vault can never drift away from its own ledger.

What a creator is paid

A fan buys seeds and plants them on your broadcast. They land in your vault as earned, and earned is the only balance that can become money. You can cash it out, or spend it on your own delivery and never touch a bank at all.

Planting is the thing that makes a seed cashable. The same seed leaves the buyer's balance as paid — which they could never have cashed out, by design — and arrives in yours as earned, which you can. Nothing about the seed changed except whose it is and what it is now allowed to become. That is the whole trick, and it is why nobody can buy their way to a payout: the door only opens when somebody else chooses to spend on you.

Our line is zero and stays zero. Not an introductory rate, and not one that rises with your audience. The reason it is keepable is in the next section: we are paid for delivery, so we have no reason to reach into your earnings.

The $0.25 is flat, which means it hurts small payouts and vanishes on large ones — 2.5% on $10, 0.5% on $50. The cash-out screen shows you what waiting for a bigger payout would save, which is advice we can give honestly precisely because we take nothing either way. The floor is ten seeds, kept deliberately low: a first payout is when this stops being theoretical, and making someone wait weeks for it to be "efficient" is a worse lesson than letting them see the fee and choose.

What a fan pays

The buyer pays the card fee, as a visible line. That is a deliberate change from how this worked at first, when we fronted Stripe's 2.9% + $0.30 and recovered it later. The person who chose to pay by card is the one who pays for the card, and the consequence for you is the simple one: a seed in your vault is backed by a whole dollar we actually collected. Nothing is riding on it to be apportioned later.

It is also the second place the flat-fee lesson shows up: $0.59 on $10 is 5.9%, $1.75 on $50 is 3.5%. Same arithmetic as the cash-out screen, told on the way in rather than on the way out.

What we are paid

We are paid when seeds burn, and only then. A seed sells for $1 and is consumed by delivering 1,000 viewer-minutes. What we keep is the difference between that dollar and what the bandwidth cost — which is not a percentage, and on a bad day is not a positive number.

Delivery is priced per gigabyte, so the whole thing turns on bitrate: how many bits per second your broadcast sends to each viewer. A thousand viewer-minutes at B megabits per second is B × 7.5 gigabytes. Against the $0.058/GB ceiling we plan against, a seed costs B × $0.435 to deliver:

Two things follow, and both are worth knowing before you rely on this. The first is that our interests and yours are genuinely aligned on quality-per-bit rather than opposed on revenue share: every efficiency in the encoder is money to us and costs you nothing. The second is less comfortable — a service with a four-cent margin has to be small, cheap to run, or eventually priced differently. If the price of a seed ever changes, it will change here first and it will say what it used to be.

What we spend before anyone pays anything

• One free seed to every new broadcaster. At 2.2 Mbps that is up to $0.96 of delivery given away per person, before they have spent anything.
• Up to five seeds of debt per broadcaster. Running out mid-sentence over a dollar is how someone never comes back, so a live broadcast is not cut off — the burn keeps accruing to a ceiling of five seeds and we absorb it. Topping up is asked for at the start of the next broadcast, where it reads as ordinary rather than humiliating. Our exposure per broadcaster is bounded and known: about $4.79 at 2.2 Mbps.

Why seeds only travel one way

A balance is four separate pools, not one number, and which pool value sits in decides what it can become. The rules are structural — enforced by where the value lives rather than by a check somebody has to remember to write.

Earned is the only pool with a door to money, and the only way in is somebody else choosing to spend on you. Planting on yourself is refused: it would turn non-cashable value into cashable value in one hop, which is a laundering machine rather than a top-up. Topping yourself up is allowed and is the boring transaction it should be — your money buys delivery and is destroyed by it.

Gifts between creators arrive as gifted, which can be burned or passed on but never cashed. So value crossing between creators permanently loses the ability to become money, and no chain of hands gives it back. That is why re-gifting is allowed rather than being a hole that had to be closed.

When you burn, the order is free, then gifted, then paid, then earned — least optionality first, so buying a packet never quietly eats the balance you were saving to cash out.

None of this is a missing feature. A balance that moves person to person and then out to cash is a payments product, with the licensing that implies. Seeds that flow one way and stop are what Twitch and Patreon have always done.

What this page does not claim

Every number on this page comes from src/worker/seeds.ts and migration 0019_seeds_gifted_pool.sql; the delivery arithmetic is derived from the $0.058/GB ceiling recorded there. If the code and this page disagree, the code is right and this page is a bug.  ·  What we can and cannot see  ·  Wallflower