Kick built its entire pitch to streamers around one number: a 95/5 subscription split, versus the 50/50 most creators are used to on Twitch. That's a real and meaningful difference in how much of each subscriber dollar you keep — but it's only half the story, since a generous split on a smaller, less discovered platform can still add up to less than a standard split on a much bigger one. This calculator adds your Kick subscription revenue and donations into one honest monthly total, then runs the same subscriber count through Twitch's pricing so you can see the trade-off in dollars, not just percentages.
How it works
Kick sells a single subscription tier at $4.99 — there's no Tier 1/2/3 ladder like Twitch — and pays creators 95% of that price, keeping just 5% to cover payment processing and platform overhead. The engine multiplies your subscriber count by $4.99 and by 0.95 to get subscription revenue, then adds whatever donations or tips you typically collect in a month to get your total monthly revenue. Donations aren't split at all under this model; whatever a viewer sends is assumed to reach you in full, since Kick doesn't take a platform cut of tips the way it does of subs.
Alongside that, the calculator runs the identical subscriber count through Twitch's numbers — a $5.99 sub price at the standard 50/50 split most Affiliates and Partners are on — so you get a same-subscribers comparison instead of two totals you'd have to normalize by hand. That comparison figure only touches subscription revenue; it deliberately leaves out your donations line, since those aren't a Kick-versus-Twitch difference in the first place.
Worked example
Take a streamer with 100 subscribers on Kick who also collects $200 in donations and tips during a typical month.
- Subscription revenue: 100 × $4.99 × 0.95 = $474.05
- Total monthly revenue: $474.05 + $200.00 = $674.05
- Same 100 subs on Twitch (50/50 split, $5.99 price): 100 × $5.99 × 0.50 = $299.50
On subscription revenue alone, this streamer keeps $174.55 more per month on Kick than the identical subscriber count would generate on Twitch's standard split — a gap that only grows as the subscriber count climbs, since it scales linearly with subscribers.
How to interpret your result
Read the Kick total as a realistic floor built from a publicly advertised split, not a mirror of your actual bank deposit. Kick doesn't publish a breakdown of chargebacks, fraud holds, or payment processor fees the way it publishes the headline 95/5 number, so a small amount can quietly disappear between the sticker split and what actually lands in your account. Gifted and resubbed subscriptions are folded into your subscriber count the same way a fresh paid sub is, so don't double count them separately.
The Twitch comparison is the honest part of this tool worth sitting with. A better split does not automatically mean better money — Kick's overall audience, ad-supported discovery tools, and subscriber conversion are all smaller and less mature than Twitch's, so 100 subscribers on Kick and 100 on Twitch are not equally easy to get. If you're deciding whether to stream exclusively on one platform or the other, treat this comparison as one input among several, not the whole decision. Growth potential, existing community, and how each platform's discovery algorithm treats your content matter just as much as the split itself.
Methodology & sources
The formulas are subRevenue = subscribers × $4.99 × 0.95, monthlyRevenue = subRevenue + donationsPerMonth, and, for comparison only, twitchEquivalentSubRevenue = subscribers × $5.99 × 0.50.
Kick's $4.99 subscription price and 95/5 creator split are documented directly in Kick's own Understanding Kick's revenue split help center article. The $5.99 Twitch Tier 1 price and standard 50/50 split used for the comparison figure come from Twitch's Local Subscription Pricing help article and Twitch's own payout program update describing the standard split and the Partner Plus tiers above it. Worth stating plainly: this tool models subscriptions and donations only. It doesn't include ad revenue-share, sponsorships, merch, or the guaranteed contract payments Kick has offered to some large streamers outside the standard split — none of those are fixed, public, per-streamer rates that can be modeled honestly here.