Overlayr vs StreamElements pricing: $447 vs $69 once

OneTimeSuite Blog · Published 2026-07-21

StreamElements and Streamlabs gate the good stuff — premium themes, watermark removal, extras — behind paid tiers like Streamlabs Ultra at $19/mo ($149/yr). Overlayr is a self-hosted overlay suite: countdown timers, goal bars, tickers, starting-soon scenes and alerts, each a tokenized URL you drop into an OBS Browser Source, updated live over WebSocket from your own server. $69 once, no watermark, no cloud lag.

This is the full pricing breakdown: what StreamElements actually costs over one, two and three years, what Overlayr gives you for $69 paid once, and the honest cases where the subscription is still the right call.

What StreamElements actually costs you

At $19/mo (Streamlabs Ultra), one StreamElements subscription adds up to $149 every year — $447 over a three-year window, for software you stop owning the day you cancel. Overlayr is $69 the day you buy it, and the meter never runs again.

Three years in, the gap is $378 — and every year after that adds another $149 to the subscription side of the ledger.

Overlayr vs StreamElements, feature by feature

Price is only half the story — here's how the two line up on the things that decide day-to-day use:

What you get for $69, once

Self-hosted stream overlays — countdowns, goal bars, tickers, alerts — each just a URL in an OBS Browser Source. The highlights:

• ⏱️ Countdown timer — Target datetime or duration mode, pause/resume/reset from the dashboard, custom end message, optional end sound.
• 🎯 Goal bar — Animated fill, +1/+5/+10 dashboard buttons, milestone flash on target — also settable via webhook.
• 📜 Rotating ticker — A list of messages with fade/slide transitions or a scrolling marquee mode.
• 🎬 Starting-soon scene — Full-screen headline + sub-text + embedded countdown, optional background image and looping audio.

Streamlabs Ultra is $149/yr. Overlayr pays for itself in about 3.5 months — and saves you roughly $378 over 3 years.

Switching is 3 steps

1. Buy once on Whop. One-time $69 for the packaged Windows desktop app plus a guided VPS deploy — lifetime updates included.
2. Create an overlay, copy its URL. Pick a type and theme in the dashboard, tweak it in the live editor, copy the tokenized OBS URL with its recommended Browser Source size.
3. Paste into OBS and go live. Edits push to the overlay instantly over WebSocket — no refreshing Browser Sources mid-stream. Run the Live Control panel for big one-tap buttons during the session.

When paying StreamElements is still the right call

Being straight about it: the subscription earns its keep in three situations. If your team is large enough that StreamElements's collaboration features, permissions and admin controls are genuinely load-bearing; if your workflow is built on its integrations and leaving means rebuilding that plumbing; or if you have enterprise requirements — SSO, audit logs, SLAs, a vendor to call — that a pay-once app doesn't come with. Everyone else is paying $19/mo (Streamlabs Ultra) for a job that runs fine on hardware they already own.

If that's you, Overlayr is $69, once. For the deeper dive, read the Overlayr vs StreamElements head-to-head or the full StreamElements comparison.

Frequently asked questions

Is it really free on GitHub?
Yes — the full source is MIT at github.com/bensblueprints/overlayr-mvp. The $69 buys the packaged installer, guided VPS deploy and lifetime updates instead of running npm and docker yourself.

Isn't StreamElements free?
The core is, and it's genuinely good — that's the honest answer. But the polished themes, extras and watermark removal live in paid tiers (Streamlabs Ultra is $19/mo, OWN3D Pro $12.99/mo), and your overlays live on their cloud either way. Overlayr is for streamers who want to own the whole stack and never see a "premium" upsell again.

Does it do follower/sub alerts from Twitch automatically?
Not natively — alerts fire from the dashboard or a webhook (POST /hook/:token). If you already run Streamer.bot or any EventSub relay, point it at the webhook and platform events flow through. If you want zero-setup native platform alerts, StreamElements still does that out of the box.

Why don't my timers reset when OBS reloads the source?
Because the server owns the clock. Overlayr stores started_at/ends_at in SQLite and recomputes remaining time on every WebSocket reconnect — scene switches and Browser Source reloads always resync to the correct time.

Do I need a VPS?
No — desktop mode runs the whole server locally and OBS points at 127.0.0.1 URLs. A $5 VPS only matters if you want to control overlays from another machine or keep them up while your PC reboots.

More on StreamElements pricing

Overlayr — product page, demo & full feature list · All OneTimeSuite pricing breakdowns