16 Jul 2026 · 6 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. Everything below was checked against their public pages in July 2026, including the parts where they beat us, and including the third service that undercuts us both.
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 much of the world you want to reach, 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.
Three things, and none of them are small.
Their free tier is five times the size of ours. New RoboStreamer accounts are loaded with 120 hours of broadcasting time, with no payment details required, so you can prove the idea works on your own store page before spending a cent. We credit new accounts with 1,440 free minutes, which is a full day, also with no card required. A day is enough to watch a broadcast run on your own page, but it is not five days, and if the length of the free trial is what decides it for you, they win that one outright.
They refund unused balance and we do not. RoboStreamer will refund credit you have not spent, down to a $5 minimum. Our minutes are prepaid and final: they never expire, but they are not refundable outside the statutory withdrawal right in our terms, and anything left on a closed account is forfeited. Our terms say so plainly and so should this page. If you want the option of getting your money back out, they offer it more freely than we do.
They have a much longer track record. RoboStreamer launched in August 2022 and publishes a page for every game it has broadcast. Their own press page reports over 750 games streamed within about eighteen months of launching, and their developer has described hosting more than 200 broadcasts simultaneously during a single Next Fest. We cannot match that history and we are not going to dress up a shorter one as an advantage. If years in service and a visible roster of real games is what you weigh most heavily, weigh it honestly, because it is the strongest argument against us on this page.
They also offer purchasing-power-parity discounts to non-profits and developers in lower-income regions on request. We have no equivalent scheme. If you are a solo developer somewhere that $5 is not a rounding error, that is worth an email to them.
A comparison page that only names the competitor it beats is an advert wearing a lab coat, so here is the inconvenient one. BroadcastLoop does the same job as both of us and advertises, in its own words, “From only 0.38c per day”. That is a from-price rather than a flat rate, and their page does not break down the tiers, so treat it as a floor rather than a promise. Either way it sits below our $0.72 and well below RoboStreamer's $1. They also offer 24 hours of free broadcasting to new accounts with no payment details.
We have not used BroadcastLoop and we are not going to invent a reason for you to distrust it. We have not tested its uptime, its restart behaviour, its encoder or its support, so we have nothing to tell you about any of them. What we can tell you is that on price alone it wins, and if per-day cost is the only axis you care about, you now know where to look. We would rather you heard that here than felt misled later.
So the honest shape of this market in July 2026 is three services doing one job at three prices: roughly 38 cents, 72 cents and a dollar a day. Nobody is getting rich on the difference. What actually separates them is what happens after you press start.
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.
We speak nine languages. This knowledgebase and the whole site are published in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Japanese and Turkish. RoboStreamer offers three: English, German and Spanish. If you are not reading in English right now, that is the difference, and it is not a small one when the thing you are trying to understand is a broadcast spec that fails silently when you get one field wrong.
We write the documentation you are reading. RoboStreamer has published eight blog posts in total, and the most recent went up in June 2024. Some of them are good: their OBS comparison is long and genuinely useful. But Steam's broadcast rules, its stats retention and its demo App ID behaviour have all been sitting in Valve's docs unwritten-about for two years, which is most of why this knowledgebase exists.
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 of the three you choose, and it is not the sort of thing you want to discover on the first morning of a festival.
If you want the longest free run at it, start with RoboStreamer's 120 free hours. That is five days to prove the idea on your own store page for nothing, and we do not match it. Our own 1,440 free minutes and BroadcastLoop's 24 free hours are a single day each, which is plenty to tell you whether the concept works, but not enough to carry you through an event.
If the lowest possible price per day is what decides it, we are not the cheapest and we have said so above.
If you already know you want your page live for a full event and you are choosing between us and RoboStreamer, the arithmetic is ours: seven days for $5 instead of five, 180 days for $100 instead of 105, and the same job for 28% less per day. If you want the loop to survive a bad night without you noticing, that is what the supervised restart is for. And if the person setting this up reads Japanese or Polish or Turkish rather than English, we are the only one of the three who wrote any of this down for them.
Prices move and services change. This page was accurate in July 2026 and it names the two things our competitors do better than us, so if you find something here that has gone stale, we would genuinely 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.
Upload a video, paste your stream key, hit start. From $0.72/day.
Start streaming · $0.72/day