BepChat

One chat overlay for Twitch, Kick, YouTube and TikTok.

BepChat merges live chat from every platform you stream on into a single transparent page you can drop into OBS as a browser source. It renders 7TV, BetterTTV and FrankerFaceZ emotes on all four platforms, shows real badge art and each service's own logo beside its messages, and supports 7TV name paints.

There is no account system. All configuration lives in the overlay URL, so the public instance stores nothing about you and a self-hosted instance needs no database.

Try it

Build an overlay URL at chat.dek.to, then add it in OBS under Sources → + → Browser. The background is transparent, so no chroma key is needed.

How each platform connects

Platform	Transport	Credentials
Twitch	Anonymous IRC over WebSocket, direct from the browser	None
Kick	Kick's public Pusher feed, direct from the browser	None
YouTube	Relayed by the server over SSE, using YouTube's internal live chat API	None
TikTok	Relayed by the server via tiktok-live-connector	None, but see below

Twitch and Kick never touch the server, which is why they scale for free. Only YouTube and TikTok need a relay, and identical channels share one upstream connection no matter how many viewers are watching.

Self-hosting

Docker

git clone https://github.com/dekrom/BepChat && cd BepChat
cp .env.example .env    # optional; every value has a working default
docker compose up -d

Open http://localhost:8080.

Node

Requires Node.js 22 or newer.

npm install
npm start

To skip TikTok support and run with zero dependencies:

npm install --omit=optional
npm start

Configuration

Every variable is optional. An instance with no configuration at all still serves working overlays for all four platforms — the settings below only affect badge art, capacity and TikTok quota.

Variable	Default	Purpose
PORT	8080	HTTP port
HOST	0.0.0.0	Bind address
TWITCH_CLIENT_ID	–	Optional app credentials from dev.twitch.tv. Badge art works without them; setting them routes global badges through the official Helix API instead.
TWITCH_CLIENT_SECRET	–	As above
EULER_API_KEY	–	EulerStream key raising the TikTok signing quota
TIKTOK_ENABLED	true	Set false to disable TikTok relaying entirely
MAX_ROOMS	50	Concurrent upstream relay connections
MAX_CLIENTS	300	Concurrent overlay viewers on the relay
MAX_CLIENTS_PER_IP	5	Per-address relay connection limit
RATE_LIMIT_PER_MIN	30	Requests per minute for the JSON endpoints
ROOM_IDLE_GRACE_SEC	60	How long an unwatched relay stays open, so an OBS refresh does not reconnect upstream
TRUST_PROXY	–	Set 1 when behind a reverse proxy so X-Forwarded-For is honoured
YT_OFFLINE_POLL_SEC	60	How often to check whether a YouTube channel went live
YT_POLL_MAX_MS	2500	Gap between live-chat polls; YouTube asks for 10s, which leaves its messages that far behind Twitch and Kick

Overlay URL parameters

/overlay?twitch=yourname&kick=yourname&size=2&font=6&fade=30&stroke=1

Channels

Parameter	Value
twitch	Channel login name
kick	Channel slug
youtube	@handle or UC… channel id
tiktok	Username, with or without the @
ytv	A specific YouTube video id. Only needed for unlisted broadcasts; public streams are discovered automatically.
kick_room	Numeric Kick chatroom id. Only needed if your network blocks Kick's channel API.

Appearance

Parameter	Values	Default	Effect
size	1–3	2	Text size
font	0–15	0	Font family — see below
weight	300–900	600	Font weight; names render 200 heavier, capped at 900
italic	true/false	false	Italic text
uppercase	true/false	false	Uppercase names
entry	slide/fade/pop/grow/none	slide	Entry animation
fade	seconds	0	Remove messages after N seconds; 0 keeps them
stroke	0–3	0	Text outline width
stroke_color	six hex digits	000000	Outline colour
shadow	0–3	2	Text shadow strength
shadow_color	six hex digits	000000	Shadow colour
glow	0–3	0	Coloured glow layered over the shadow
glow_color	six hex digits	ffffff	Glow colour
spacing	0–24	4	Pixels between messages
max	1–200	40	Messages kept on screen
bg	none/dark/light	none	Message background box
bg_opacity	0–100	60	Box opacity when bg is set
direction	up/down	up	Whether new messages appear at the bottom or the top
timestamps	true/false	false	Show HH:MM before each message
chips	icon/color/none	icon	Platform mark: the service's logo, a coloured square, or nothing
badges	true/false	true	Show badges
name_color	six hex digits	–	Force one colour for every name. 7TV paints still take precedence.
animate	true/false	true	Legacy alias: false means entry=none

Fonts

id	Font		id	Font
0	System		8	SF Pro (Apple)
1	Arial Black		9	SF Pro Rounded
2	Verdana		10	Segoe UI
3	Comic Sans		11	Tahoma
4	Trebuchet		12	Times
5	Courier		13	Century Gothic
6	Impact		14	Consolas
7	Georgia		15	Palatino

SF Pro ships with macOS and iOS and cannot be redistributed as a webfont, so ids 8 and 9 only render as SF Pro where the font is installed. Everywhere else they fall back to the closest available face. This matters for OBS: the font has to exist on the machine running the browser source, not on the server.

Ids 0–7 are fixed and will not be renumbered.

Filtering

Parameter	Values	Default	Effect
platforms	csv of twitch,kick,youtube,tiktok	all	Only connect to these platforms
hide_commands	true/false	false	Hide messages starting with !
hide_bots	csv of names	–	Hide specific chatters, e.g. nightbot,streamelements

Limitations

These are properties of the platforms, not bugs:

• YouTube has no public live chat API, so BepChat uses the same internal endpoint the web player does. It can break when YouTube changes their markup.
• YouTube unlisted streams are invisible to automatic discovery. Use ytv.
• TikTok requires a third-party service (EulerStream) to sign its WebSocket handshake. The free tier is limited, so on a busy public instance TikTok is best-effort — the overlay reports throttled rather than failing silently. Set EULER_API_KEY for a higher quota.
• Kick sits behind Cloudflare, which rejects server-side requests based on their TLS fingerprint. BepChat resolves Kick channels in the browser instead, where it works. kick_room is the manual fallback.
• Twitch badge art and channel emote sets need the channel's numeric id, which the official Helix API only hands out to a registered app. So that a zero-configuration instance still works, BepChat reads the same public data from the endpoint twitch.tv's own web client uses. Setting TWITCH_CLIENT_ID/SECRET switches global badges to Helix.
• YouTube Super Chats and membership posts are rendered, the former with its amount shown as a badge. Subs, raids, gifts and moderation events on every platform are ignored by design.

Development

npm install
npm test        # node --test, no test framework needed
npm start

There is no build step. The server is plain Node ESM and the frontend is native ES modules, so editing a file and reloading is the whole workflow.

src/           HTTP server, relay rooms, platform sources, upstream API clients
public/        overlay page, builder page, both as native ES modules
shared/        identifier validation used by the server and the browser alike
test/          node:test suites

Credits

Badge and emote artwork belongs to its respective owners: Twitch, Kick, YouTube, TikTok, 7TV, BetterTTV and FrankerFaceZ. Kick's standard badge SVGs are vendored in public/kickbadges/, and each platform's logo is drawn in public/overlay/icons.mjs to identify which chat a message came from. Those marks are the trademarks of their respective owners. BepChat is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any of these services.

Licence

MIT — see LICENSE.