For over five years I have run my tipping portal, alerts, various overlays, and a bunch of other stuff through the third-party company StreamElements for my Twitch streams. Over time, I opted for self-made solutions for as much as possible because there were moments of downtime on their end that frequently led to things like chat overlays or alerts simply not working for the day.

That led to my own locally-hosted chat overlay, and using tools such as Streamer.bot to control the majority of my streams' functions. At this point all of my functions -- chatbot !commands, burp and canta counts, tip goal completion text, multi-platform sub counts and more were all handled in-house.

Until now, StreamElements remained a part of my "streamer stack" for two purposes only: the tipping portal, and by extension the sound alerts. I could have made a local solution for sound alerts, but it just seemed like there would be too many possible points of failure to be worth the time. I could get the sound alerts running locally, and serve a simple html page that would feed the sounds to my chat phone when played. I just didn't want to use the already unrealiable streamelements in this process if the point was to get away from them in the first place -- I have hundreds of sound alerts and the migration is more than just a matter of copying. More on that later.

Then came StreamElements' big announcement email around the end of June. It was official, they are shutting down their "SE-Pay" wallet and payment gateway. They ensured us PayPal will still be an option and that you can withdraw your funds from your SE-Pay wallet until the end of 2026. We could go on for hours about this subject but the end result was that basically a lot of people globally lose a route to tip streamers, especially if they do not (or can not) use PayPal.

I got a fun surprise -- for a couple of days, my entire tipping page was gone because they were likely doing a back-end removal of all of the former "SE-Pay" stuff from the tipping pages of everyone who already had it integrated. I got to learn about it via someone who was trying to tip during one of my streams.

That day, I decided enough was enough. It was time to break free from any other third party setups and build my own payment gateway and alerts manager. After five years of them having basically ZERO updates to how the system works, it's safe to say I have quite a few ideas of how I would do things better. So that's how this project became a thing.

I know that StreamElements is not shutting down entirely, it is reportedly in some talks about major acquisition from other companies. The thing is, I have very little faith in whatever ends up acquiring them...I have a strong feeling it's going to be Twitch themselves, and they'll likely be interested in taking generous cuts of your tips.

So, StreamElements might not be dead, but they are to me.