Get to Know Us: A Community-First Project

FrostyTools is a community-first project, built by a few people and made possible by many. From our two co-founders to our community director, ambassadors, Benefactors, streamers, viewers, testers, and friends have all helped shape and sustain what it is today.

When I say “we,” I mean this whole community.

FrostyTools is not a big corporation or a venture-funded startup. It is a small team donating a great deal of time, supported by a much larger community.

More than 29 million moments have been made together.

About 24 million of those moments were provided to free users.

Keeping FrostyTools accessible takes a careful balance. Benefactors receive added features and help carry the platform for the wider community. Cooldowns help keep free access sustainable, while our small team donates a great deal of time to keep FrostyTools working and improving.

We are proud of what those numbers represent: millions of moments of laughter, surprise, and connection shared between streamers, viewers, and communities.

Making Room for Everyone

Accessibility has always been part of the foundation of FrostyTools. We want every streamer to have a way to participate and know how hard life can be sometimes. Circumstances change, budgets get tight, and there are times when there simply is not room for another expense. We do not want that alone to prevent people from using and enjoying FrostyTools.

Making room for everyone is something this community supports together. Benefactors help carry the financial costs. The people behind FrostyTools contribute a great deal of volunteer time. Ambassadors, testers, streamers, viewers, and friends contribute ideas, feedback, encouragement, and care. Different people help in different ways.

FrostyTools does not sell your data or make money from your data. You are not the product. We are building the kind of service we would want to use ourselves, one that respects your privacy and treats people with honesty, dignity, and care.

Free access still has a real cost to deliver functionality. Every moment requires servers, hosting, infrastructure, processing, and services from multiple AI providers. FrostyTools pays those costs whether or not the person using the tools can contribute or not.

Benefactors are a vital part of this shared support. Their contributions keep the tools running, fund improvements for everyone, and help preserve access for people who are unable to contribute.

Whether you are able to support FrostyTools financially or rely on free access, you belong here.

To every Benefactor helping keep that door open, thank you.

Real People, Real Economics

Much of what keeps FrostyTools running still comes from donated hours and volunteer work, every day.

All of us working on FrostyTools must maintain other income sources to pay our bills, care for our families, and manage many of the same pressures as everyone else. Even with the Benefactor program, FrostyTools does not currently generate enough revenue to support one full-time engineer with the necessary skills to build and maintain an infrastructure as complex as FrostyTools.

Ken and I took out a substantial loan, which we remain responsible for, to help support FrostyTools and launch Highlight Hunter.

When those funds ran out, we faced a difficult choice. We could shut down Highlight Hunter and potentially reduce other parts of FrostyTools, or adjust its pricing to better align with the platform’s processing costs and let each person decide whether it still made sense for them.

We chose to keep it available and give people that choice. Ken and I cannot responsibly take out another loan to subsidize usage. Loans cannot be the model for keeping FrostyTools alive.

The technology industry can make the real cost of a product difficult to see.

StreamElements, for example, raised about $111 million in total funding, including a $100 million round announced in September 2021. In July 2026, Razer acquired substantially all of the assets used to operate StreamElements and continued the platform under its ownership. (Razer)

That is not a criticism of StreamElements, corporations, or venture funding. StreamElements built products that millions of creators rely on. Its story simply shows how difficult sustainability can be, even with more than $100 million behind a platform.

Large investments can cover the difference between what a service costs to operate and what people are asked to pay. From the outside, that can make a product appear free or inexpensive, even when its real costs are much higher. Eventually, the economics still have to work.

FrostyTools has no investor subsidy and no corporate parent covering that gap. We are making it work day by day, growing organically through the time, support, and participation of people who genuinely value what we are building.

Listening and Looking Forward

I know some of our past invitations to become a Benefactor felt too frequent. A critical Reddit post about those invitations has become one of the most visible search results about FrostyTools.

I will be honest. That has been hard on morale when so much of this work is volunteered and deeply personal. Not because people should not speak honestly, but because when you give so much of yourself to something, you naturally hope the positive experiences will travel as far as the difficult ones.

We also understand why this happens. Most of us are more likely to speak publicly when something frustrates us or when we cannot see a path toward resolving it. When something quietly works and makes the day a little better, we often just keep moving.

If you are willing, please make a post on any of the socials from time-to-time to share how FrostyTools makes your life better, or how it delights your community.

The FrostyTools team is listening. This is about trying to do the right thing and finding a healthier balance.

FrostyTools still needs and warmly welcomes Benefactors. We simply want those invitations to feel warm, occasional, and respectful. We will experiment with softer messages, such as:

We want everyone to feel welcome while giving people who can support FrostyTools a comfortable opportunity to help carry it forward. When FrostyTools creates something you enjoy, sharing that experience also helps others discover what this community is building.

That same listening guides how every FrostyTools product develops. The team will keep improving quality, reliability, and usability, looking for meaningful ways to reduce costs, and creating functionality that streamers and their communities genuinely value.

We hope Highlight Hunter and Shortify help your social channels grow. If they do not provide enough value, if the cost does not work for you, or if another service is a better fit, including one supported by venture funding, we understand. There is no judgment. Use what works for you.

The same principle applies across FrostyTools. If a product is not serving the community because of its functionality, quality, reliability, usefulness, adoption, or cost, it may be improved, simplified, paused, or retired.

That includes Highlight Hunter. If a healthy balance cannot be found between what it provides and what it costs to operate, it may be shut down so the team can focus its limited time and resources on the tools the community values most.

Taking care of the community also means protecting FrostyTools as a whole.

The Next 29 Million

FrostyTools is made possible by people contributing in different ways.

• There are people donating a great deal of time.
• There are Benefactors helping carry the costs and fund what comes next.
• There are people relying on free access.
• There are streamers, viewers, ambassadors, testers, supporters, and friends helping us understand what is working and what should be built next.

We want FrostyTools to be worth supporting and remain accessible to everybody. We want to keep improving the tools people love, while making responsible decisions.

We also hope to reach a point where the people contributing so much time and care can receive a fair paycheck for their work. We are not there today, but that remains part of building a healthier future for FrostyTools.

Most of all, we want to keep creating moments together.

The FrostyTools team will keep listening, improving, and looking for better ways to balance quality, accessibility, and cost. Together, we can continue building something amazing and creates moments worth sharing.