16 Jul 2026 · 5 min read
RoboStreamer and Loopcast do the same job: they loop a video onto your Steam store page from a datacenter, so you never leave a PC streaming. We build one of them, so read this with that in mind. The figures below were checked against their public pages in July 2026, and we have kept the comparison to things you can verify yourself: what each one costs, what you have to configure, and what happens when a stream drops at 3am.
It is worth saying plainly, because a comparison page that pretends otherwise is not worth reading: these two services are built on the same idea. Both are hosted in a datacenter, so your own machine stays off. Both ask you to upload a video and paste a stream key from Steam. Both loop that video to your store page around the clock. Both sell prepaid time rather than a monthly subscription, both let an unused balance sit for months without expiring, and both charge proportionally when you run several broadcasts in parallel.
So you are not choosing between two philosophies. You are choosing on price, on how many platforms you can reach from one upload, and on what happens when a stream falls over at 3am.
RoboStreamer charges $1 for 24 hours of non-stop broadcasting. Loopcast charges $0.72 for the same 24 hours. That is the base rate, and it is about 28% less.
The more useful comparison is what the same banknote actually buys, because both services start at a $5 minimum:
At the $5 entry point RoboStreamer gives you 7,200 minutes, which is five days. The same $5 here is 10,080 minutes, which is a whole seven. That difference matters more than it looks: a Steam Next Fest runs seven days, so one $5 pack covers the entire event without a top-up.
The gap widens with volume, because our bonus grows with pack size - from about 1% on the $5 pack up to 30% on the $100 one. The full ladder is in how pricing works.
Nobody is getting rich on the difference between 72 cents and a dollar. What separates the two is what happens after you press start.
In fairness, their terms are still more generous than ours in two places. Our free trial is now the longer one on paper: new Loopcast accounts get 7 days, 10,080 minutes, against their 120 hours, and neither of us asks for a card. But ours runs on a clock. The week starts when you confirm your email address and whatever is unused at the end of it expires, so what we are giving you is a week to evaluate us rather than a balance to keep. And they refund unspent credit down to a $5 minimum, where minutes you buy from us are prepaid and final: those never expire, but outside the statutory withdrawal right in our terms they are not refundable. If either of those is what decides it for you, then it decides it.
Billing stops at the minute. Your balance is minutes of one live stream, and the meter stops the moment the stream does. A ten-minute test costs ten minutes, not a day. When your balance hits zero the broadcast pauses by itself, so there is no overage to be surprised by.
We transcode for you. Steam is strict about its broadcast spec: H.264 High@4.1, a keyframe every two seconds, constant bitrate, AAC audio. Get one field wrong and the feed is refused. Upload whatever you have and we re-encode it to that spec, which is why you never touch an encoder setting. The details are in video specs and encoding for Steam.
The stream supervises itself. A 24/7 broadcast is really a question about the other 23 hours, when nobody is watching the dashboard. If the feed drops, ours restarts on its own rather than waiting for you to notice at breakfast.
One upload, three platforms. Loopcast broadcasts to Steam store pages, YouTube Live and Kick from the same video library, and running them together is discounted per stream: the first platform bills at the full rate, the second at 75% and the third at 50%. RoboStreamer is Steam only, so the moment you want the same trailer looping on YouTube or Kick as well, that is a second tool and a second bill.
We write the documentation you are reading. RoboStreamer's blog runs to eight posts in total and the most recent went up in June 2024. Steam's broadcast rules, its stats retention and its demo App ID behaviour have been sitting in Valve's own docs unwritten-about for years, which is most of why this knowledgebase exists and why you are reading this here rather than there.
Before you pick anyone, know that no service can broadcast on your behalf if Steam will not let your account broadcast at all. Valve requires the streaming account to be non-limited, meaning it must have spent at least $5 on Steam at some point. It must hold Broadcast Live permission in Steamworks or belong to the Store Broadcast Beta group, it must have legitimate access to the game, and it must not be Community Banned. A brand-new account made purely for streaming will fail the first of those, which is the single most common complaint on Steam's own forums.
Sort that out before you pay anybody anything. It is the same requirement whichever service you choose, and it is not the sort of thing you want to discover on the first morning of a festival.
Us, on the arithmetic. The same job for 28% less per day, a $5 pack that covers a full seven-day Next Fest instead of running dry on day five, and $100 that buys 180 days instead of 105. The meter stops when the stream does, so a ten-minute test costs ten minutes rather than a day. You never open an encoder. And if the feed drops at 3am it comes back on its own, which is most of what you are paying someone else to hold the connection for.
Take RoboStreamer if a trial you can spend at your own pace or the refundable balance is the thing you need, and take neither of us until Steam will let your account broadcast at all, because that is the one part of this no service can buy you out of.
Prices move and services change. This page was accurate in July 2026, so if you find something here that has gone stale, we would rather you told us than quietly assumed the rest of it was marketing.
Still weighing a hosted service against your own PC? That is a different question, and we answered it in Loopcast vs running OBS. If you already have your stream key, you can be live in about five minutes.