It is the most natural idea a streamer has about giveaways: the people who pay me should get something. It is generous in intent, it is easy to set up, and it is the single format that consumer law and platform policy both keep bumping into.
The leg it removes
A prize draw is usually described with three parts: a prize, chance, and consideration — something the entrant gives up to take part. Get all three and you are in territory that has real rules attached in most places. Free entry is what removes the third one, which is why almost every simple giveaway is free to enter.
A subscription is money. Restricting entry to subscribers does not merely favour them; it means the only way into the draw runs through a payment. Whether that counts as consideration is a question for a lawyer in your jurisdiction, and the reason to care is that it is exactly the question you were avoiding by running a free giveaway in the first place.
Four platforms, four separate fences
What is striking is that no platform wrote one rule about this. They each fenced off a different approach to it, which is usually what happens when something is a problem from several angles at once.
| Platform | What its own policy says |
|---|---|
| Kick | Giveaway buy-ins are prohibited outright, as gambling involving other users’ funds |
| Kick | Kicks and Gifts may not be required to enter a giveaway, unless expressly authorised |
| YouTube | Contests must be free to enter; contests may not be used to manipulate metrics |
| Meta | A promotion may not require or incentivise sharing, reposting or tagging |
| Twitch | Requires a specific disclaimer naming you as the promoter, not Twitch |
None of those says "no sub-only giveaways" in so many words. Together they describe a consistent position: entry should not cost the entrant, and a platform does not want its own currency, metrics or social graph used as the price.
What the tools will happily let you do
Worth knowing that the giveaway tools themselves are mostly neutral on this, and several actively offer the format. Nightbot has luck sliders that give subscribers extra entries. StreamerGiveaway supports subscribe-to-enter outright, with new and gifted subs entered automatically, and channel-points entry beside it.
That is not a criticism of either — they are giving streamers what streamers ask for, and a tool that refused would simply lose to one that did not. But it does mean the absence of a warning in the interface is not evidence that the format is fine. The tool is not the one who has to answer for the promotion.
It also means switching a setting on is genuinely the whole effort, which is the part that makes this worth writing down. Formats that take one click and carry a legal question are exactly the ones people adopt without ever having considered the question.
The workaround that does not work
The standard fix is an alternative method of entry — the "no purchase necessary, enter by post" line on the back of every crisp packet. That is a real mechanism and it is not one a stream giveaway can casually bolt on: the free route has to be genuinely equivalent, actually available, and stated in the rules, not a sentence nobody can act on.
If your free alternative is "DM me and I will add you", you have built something where the paid route is one tap and the free route depends on you noticing a message. A regulator looking at that is not going to be impressed by the existence of the sentence.
SarahStreams
is giving away prizes
Friday night giveaway
Prize
Steam key · Elden Ring
Enter for a chance to win!
Official rules
No purchase necessary. Open to entrants 18+ worldwide. One entry per person.
Entries close when the streamer starts the draw. The winner is drawn at random on stream. The winner is notified by email.
Prize: Steam key · Elden Ring. Promoter: SarahStreams.
Viewers who have entered SarahStreams's previous giveaways get up to twice the chance of winning this one. This is based only on how often you have taken part — never on paying, subscribing or spending anything.
This is a promotion by SarahStreams. Twitch does not sponsor or endorse this promotion and is not responsible for it.
Generated from this giveaway's settings. Not legal advice.
Why streamers reach for it anyway
Worth being fair about the motivation, because the advice lands better if it acknowledges the problem. Subscribers are the people funding the channel, and watching a prize you paid for go to somebody who arrived four minutes ago and will never come back is genuinely deflating. Sub-only entry is a reasonable response to a real feeling.
It also works, in the narrow sense. Sub-only giveaways do convert — that is why they persist. The catch is what they convert: a subscription bought to enter a draw is the least durable kind there is, and the cancellation lands the week after the winner is announced. You get the number and not the person.
So the argument against is not only the legal one. It is that the format is expensive in trust, thin in retention, and the thing it is trying to achieve — regulars doing better than strangers — has a version that costs nothing and carries no risk.
What to do instead
Separate the two things you actually wanted. If the goal is to reward subscribers, give them something that is not a lottery ticket — an emote, a role, a Discord channel, first pick of something. Perks are unrestricted; it is specifically tying a chance of winning to a payment that causes the trouble.
If the goal is for regulars to do better in the draw, weight it by attendance. Someone who has entered your last four giveaways getting up to twice the chance of a first-timer is a loyalty reward that costs the viewer nothing, which keeps entry free and keeps the draw simple. It also rewards the thing you actually value, which is people showing up rather than people paying.
And say it out loud. A weighting nobody can see is indistinguishable from a rigged draw, which is why the version worth running tells every viewer their own odds — including the ones who do not have the bonus yet. Told plainly, it also does the job sub-only entry was reaching for: a first-timer learns, in the moment they enter, that sticking around is worth something here.