We moved giveaways to the free plan. Here is the whole reasoning.

For most of this year, running a giveaway on Kloot meant being on a paid plan. That is no longer true. Two giveaways and two polls a month are now on the free plan, on every platform Kloot supports, with no card and no trial that quietly expires. This post is the reasoning, including the part that is plainly self-interested, because a "we did this for you" post that omits the business case is not worth reading.

The uncomfortable thing about a paid giveaway tool

A giveaway is an advertisement for the tool that runs it. When a streamer puts a wheel on screen and two hundred people scan a code, every one of those people has just been shown the product. That is the single most efficient thing that happens anywhere near Kloot, and for most of this year it was behind a paywall — which meant the people most likely to show it to an audience, streamers who are small and unsure whether any of this works, were exactly the people who could not.

I should be straightforward about my vantage point here: I have never streamed. I built Kloot after reading a lot of documentation and talking to people who do it for a living, and the thing they said most often was not about features. It was that they would not put an unfamiliar tool on screen in front of their audience without trying it first, and that "try it" means a real giveaway with real viewers, not a sandbox.

What free actually includes

The distinction that matters is between volume and fairness. Free gets a complete draw: viewers enter by scanning a code on the overlay, the wheel or the reel spins on stream, the winner claims from wherever they are, and the draw publishes a receipt anyone can check. Nothing about the draw itself is degraded. What the paid plans buy is running more of them, scheduling them ahead of a stream, and keeping the list of viewers who asked to be told about the next one.

The arithmetic

Two a month is a real number, not a token. It is roughly one giveaway a fortnight, which is about the cadence a streamer building a routine actually wants, and it is enough that the tool has to work properly rather than merely demo well. It is also low enough that a channel running giveaways as a weekly fixture will hit it — and at that point the upgrade is an easy conversation, because the tool has already proved itself in front of their audience.

That is the self-interested half, stated plainly. The free plan is the advertisement. The difference between this and a trial is that it does not end, and the giveaway a viewer enters on the free plan is the same giveaway they would enter on the paid one.

Why the free plan is not a trial — and why your first two weeks are

Every one of those was on the table and each has the same defect: it makes the streamer’s decision about Kloot rather than about their stream. A capped early-adopter offer rewards people for arriving early rather than for the product being good, which flatters us and helps nobody. And putting the free plan itself on a clock is precisely backwards — the experiment a streamer is running is "does my audience like this", and that takes more than a fortnight to answer. So the free plan has no expiry and never asks for a card. If you want to try the paid tiers before committing, the $9 Event Pass gives you three days of everything in Pro with no subscription; that is a different thing, and it is optional.

The permanent monthly allowance underneath is what makes that safe to offer. It is legible: a streamer can hold "two a month, forever, no card" in their head and decide immediately, and nobody has to read a pricing page to work out what they are agreeing to. The fourteen days on top are a sample of the ceiling, not a countdown to losing the floor — and nothing you build during them is deleted when they end. Anything past the free limits is simply kept as a draft until you choose to upgrade.

What this means if you are a viewer

Most writing about streaming tools addresses the streamer, because the streamer is the customer. But the person whose experience actually determines whether a giveaway works is the viewer, and a viewer’s experience of most giveaway tools is poor: they type a command into a chat window they may not have open, receive no acknowledgement, and find out whether they won by watching a name appear that may or may not be theirs.

Moving giveaways to the free plan means more of those interactions happen on a system where the viewer scans a code, sees a confirmation, and — if they win — gets a screen on their own phone telling them so, with a countdown and a button, wherever they happen to be watching from. That is a better transaction, and it is better in a way the viewer notices without knowing which tool produced it. Selfishly, that is the whole growth strategy. Less selfishly, it is why the free plan had to include the claim window and the receipt rather than a stripped-down draw with an upgrade prompt where the fairness should be.

What this does not fix

Making something free does not make it good, and there are things Kloot still does not do. It is not a chat bot and does not want to be — entry is by scanning a code, which is the whole architectural bet, because a chat command only reaches the people who are already typing in the chat it belongs to. If your giveaway needs to work for the viewers watching on a phone without the chat open, that bet is in your favour. If you specifically want a !enter command, Kloot is the wrong tool and always will be.