Twitch will soon be rolling out two new subscription tiers to help fans to support their favorite streamers, and the service has taken to their blog to give a quick breakdown of how the new subscription tiers will work. There are $9.99 and $24.99 tiers, and each comes with their own perks. It’s important to mention that these perks are largely decided by the streamer to whom the Twitch user is subscribing; benefits will not be site-wide. When they first roll out, the new subscription tiers will only be available on Twitch Partner channels who have opted into the beta.
The two different subscription tiers don’t have any innate differences; they both net you an ad-free experience like the $4.99 level, and not much else. Instead, the benefits are decided by the streamer that’s being supported. The benefits of these tiers are essentially limited only by the way Twitch works and the streamer’s imagination. High tier subscribers can get things like exclusive emotes, exclusive chats with the streamer, special roles in streams, and other benefits. Naturally, if streamers choose to do so, they can go outside of the Twitch system to treat their subscribers to something special, such as an exclusive section of their website, or direct correspondence and other goodies via outside channels like email or various chat clients. Essentially, subscriptions on Twitch work much like Patreon in that regard.
For streamers, the new tiers will essentially work the same way as the $4.99 tier, with very few exceptions. For starters, channels cannot assign custom emotes quickly if their sub count is low, and will instead have to wait a bit. The new pricing tiers also do not support prorating, so changing a subscriber or benefit tier in the middle of a billing cycle won’t see the change happen until the next billing cycle. This goes for both streamers and viewers. $9.99 subscriptions are worth 2 subs, whereas $24.99 subscribers are worth 6 subs. Uploading new emotes for the higher tiers, as well as permanently unlocking emotes for subscribers, should work seamlessly at launch, thanks to partnerships with StreamLabs, BitsBattleBoss and Muxy. Finally, the subscription API has been updated to give streamers more information about their fans, such as how long they’ve been subscribed.