Business Overview

TL;DR -Viewers buy coins with real money and spend them on gifts; hosts earn diamonds from those gifts and cash them out. Social Live keeps a cut of every gift, the app stores take a cut of every purchase, and creators can grow a real business on top through tiers and agencies.

Who this is for -Executive & Business: the whole page, top to bottom. Product: the money model and where each piece is documented. Engineers: skim here, then follow the links into the detailed pages.

Social Live is a live-streaming app where the audience pays to cheer for the people they watch. Nobody hands cash to a streamer directly. Instead, money moves through two currencies -one the audience buys, one the creator earns -with the platform taking a small, predictable slice in between. This section explains that whole flow, one page at a time.

The two-currency model, in everyday words

Think of a seaside arcade.

• Coins are arcade tokens. You walk up to the machine, insert real money, and get tokens. Tokens only work inside the arcade. On Social Live, viewers buy coins through the Apple App Store or Google Play, then spend them on animated gifts during a live stream.
• Diamonds are the tickets a performer wins. When a viewer sends a gift, the host receives diamonds. Diamonds are what a creator cashes out for real money, or converts back into (non-refundable) coins to spend themselves.

Two currencies instead of one is a deliberate choice. It lets the platform give away promotional coins without ever letting that free value leak out as cash, and it creates a clean holding period between "a viewer paid" and "a creator got paid" -the window in which a refund or chargeback can still be undone.

Where the money goes

Every real dollar that enters the system is split three ways:

• The app store takes ~30% off the top of every coin purchase (Apple's and Google's standard fee).
• The platform keeps a cut of every gift. The host's baseline payout is 25% of a gift's face value; the rest is platform margin (which also funds promotions and, eventually, creator bonuses).
• The creator earns the rest as diamonds, which they can withdraw as cash once past a minimum and a settlement hold.

These numbers are not scattered around the code -they live in one file (economy.constants.ts) and are documented on the Economy page.

Creators can build a business

For a serious host, gifting income is just the base layer. The creator program adds the things that turn streaming into a career: progression tiers that raise a host's payout multiplier, quota bonuses for streaming on a schedule, competitive PK battles, and agencies that recruit and manage rosters of creators for a capped, transparent cut. That program is designed on top of the same no-loss rules as the core economy -see Creator program.

The pages in this section

Start at the top and go as deep as you need.

Related pages

• Economy -Coins & Diamonds -the money model in full.
• Creator program -how creators grow a business.
• Glossary -shared vocabulary for coins, diamonds, gifts, and more.