Tipping

Tipping lets viewers send you money directly during a stream. StreamElements supports two payment methods, and you can enable both at once:

• PayPal — one of the most widely used tipping platforms.
• SE.Pay — StreamElements’ own payment processor. See SE.Pay for its current status.

StreamElements doesn’t take a cut of your tips either way — though PayPal and SE.Pay each have their own processing fees (check the fees page linked from your Tipping Settings).

Set up PayPal tipping

1. Go to Revenue → Tipping Settings.
2. Expand Payment Providers and connect PayPal.
3. Enter your PayPal email — log into an existing account, or create a new one.
4. Click Go back to StreamElements Inc once connected.

Make sure your PayPal account is verified beforehand. If a viewer’s tip doesn’t show up in StreamElements, PayPal has likely held it for verification — you’ll need to contact PayPal support about that.

With PayPal, tips go straight to your linked account with no extra steps — you manage withdrawals entirely through PayPal’s own policies.

Tipping Settings page

Revenue → Tipping Settings controls how your tip page looks and behaves:

• Payment Providers — connect or disconnect PayPal and SE.Pay. Some methods are restricted by country or other criteria.
• Page Settings — currency (locked to your SE.Pay account currency if SE.Pay is enabled), minimum/maximum tip amount, a suggested default amount, max message length, whether viewers must log in to tip (mandatory for SE.Pay), and your tipping presets.
• Design — your tip page’s title, banner, background, and whether to show the tipping leaderboard.
• Tip Panel Setup — copy your tipping page’s URL.
• Tip Moderation — see below.

Tip moderation

Tip Moderation (part of Tipping Settings) filters donation messages before they trigger an alert:

• Disable alerts entirely for filtered tips, or just hide the message.
• Replace flagged words with something neutral, like emotes or stars.
• Standard Profanity Protection blocks common slurs and curse words automatically; Custom Profanity Protection lets you add your own filtered words, with wildcard support.
• TTS Anti-Spam blocks messages designed to spam text-to-speech with repeated words or letters.
• Manual Tip Approval — review tips from your Activity Feed before they go out; approving shows full details, denying masks the tipper’s name and removes their message. Channel Editors and Full Control managers can approve tips too.

These filters apply to usernames and messages across every alert type, not just tips. They don’t affect the underlying fund transfer — only whether/how the alert displays. Reload your overlays after changing these settings for them to take effect.

Tip alerts

Customize tip alerts (image/video, sound, and message) from the AlertBox’s settings — see AlertBox alert variations for the full walkthrough.

FAQ

What shows up on a tipper’s bank or card statement? For SE.Pay, STREAMELEMENTS*<CHANNEL NAME>-tip. For PayPal, PAYPAL *<CHANNEL NAME>.

A viewer’s donation wasn’t shown on stream — what now? They should reach out to the streamer or their mods directly, who can replay the alert next time they’re live.

Can a tip be refunded? All tips are final and non-refundable by default, but a streamer can choose to help: for PayPal tips, they can refund directly from PayPal; for SE.Pay, they’d need to contact StreamElements to process it.

Why is my SE.Pay tip being declined while the streamer is offline? SE.Pay tipping only works while the streamer is live.