Superchats are back!

Addressing questions about subscriptions; announcing new & returning features

It has now been a full month since we introduced e-Check payments for Unauthorized subscriptions in partnership with our friends at Silicon Prairie, and two months since the Stripe deplatforming put paid to the Atlas subscription system.

Above all else, we must give a massive thank you to everyone who has re-subscribed through the new e-Check system! Your support has already nearly reached the level at which we can keep the lights on indefinitely, and the importance of retaking control of our own subscription system cannot be overstated.

Now that Unauthorized is a self-contained and fully independent platform, we have been able to start moving extremely fast on projects that have been slow burners since 2023 and earlier. The manner in which Silicon Prairie has been integrated gives us total operational flexibility and will allow us to easily plug in additional payment solutions down the road whether they be card, crypto, or even more exotic systems. It has also allowed us to bring back superchats for the first time since early 2024, much to the delight of the Big Bear and his fellow creators.

e-Check & subscription notes

By far, the main issue several people have had in using the e-Check system is getting their bank accounts verified before they can make any purchases. We’d like to clear a few things up in that regard:

1. Verification will always take at least a day. Silicon Prairie verifies your bank account exactly the same way PayPal does, by sending two amounts under $1.00 and then canceling the transaction. This will always take at least one business day unless you get remarkably lucky, so there is no need to keep the verification page open. Once your account has been registered and is awaiting verification, it will appear in the Payments section of your Unauthorized account page so you can return to it at any later date.

2. You cannot register the same bank account more than once. This is a security feature enforced by Silicon Prairie, so there is no point in repeatedly trying to register the same bank account. It will either work on the first try or it’s not going to work at all. This also means that you will not be able to re-register the same bank details if you remove that registration from your Unauthorized account, so please be careful about doing that.

3. The Silicon Prairie integration is not yet 100% complete. Without getting too technical, we do not yet have an automatic way of marking your pending payments received. It’s all manual at this point, so please do not be overly concerned if your payments are still marked “pending” on Unauthorized well after they have cleared. The folks at Silicon Prairie are working on providing us with a feature to take care of that pretty much instantaneously, and it will be implemented as soon as it’s ready.

We also had a few questions from people wanting to see the full list of available subscriptions, or wondering how to subscribe to a particular creator.

• You can see the full list of Unauthorized subscription plans by clicking “SUBSCRIBE” or “New subscription” from your account page. You’ll also get the same list if you click the “Subscribe” link under content from a channel that does not have a subscription of its own. Or you could just click this button:

• You can subscribe to a particular creator/channel from any page associated with them. For example, under any video or livestream from Owen Benjamin you should see something like this:

  

  That button should take you directly to a “Feed the Bear” subscription checkout. The same button appears at the top of his channel & creator pages:

  

Finally, many non-US community members have been understandably concerned about the fact that Silicon Prairie is only available in the United States. While we are constantly working to regain a global payment option, we would like to make it entirely clear that nobody is ever going to be locked out without the possibility of accessing the content.

As a matter of fact, we have been weighing the option of removing the paywall permanently for access to most content, and only making subscriptions a requirement for livestream chat participation and specific exclusives as well as some other upcoming features that will be mentioned later. Regardless of how that decision ends up playing out, we will not under any circumstances return to the hard paywall until all of our supporters have a way of subscribing.

In terms of specific solutions, we are currently building a system to allow anyone in the world to purchase annual subscription plans via manual wire transfer. As a consequence, once that system is ready we will be offering annual plans for every subscription on Unauthorized. Other options such as new regular card processors (which we can now add/remove at the drop of a hat) and (for the vocal minority) crypto will be explored afterwards in due time.

The return of the superchat

Moving on from last month’s matters of subscriptions & payments, the big news for June is of course that superchats are back on Unauthorized!

Similar to mainstream video platforms such as YouTube & Twitch, superchats allow you to send highlighted messages in the livestream chat window. On Unauthorized, they work by means of tokens which can be purchased through your account page.

Each token costs $1 and they can be purchased in bundles of varying size. That $1 value of each token spent on a creator’s livestream is then shared with them on top of their revenue from subscriptions, giving them an incentive to go live more frequently and engage more with the chat.

The chat itself will also be overhauled before long; many viewers will have noticed that there is a significant delay between messages making it hard to hold actual conversations. This, incidentally, was the cause of Vox Day’s notorious election night stream last November, when record numbers of concurrent viewers overloaded the service and crashed the chat. While we have already implemented measures to mitigate the chances of that happening again with even greater numbers of viewers, the user experience is still not as good as it could be and should be.

Therefore, we have now begun developing a new real-time chat service that is lightweight, durable, and can be utilized by any number of different platforms simultaneously - not just Unauthorized. It will probably be some time before it’s ready for action, but this has the potential to be a game-changer for the wider community and we very much look forward to rolling it out.

What’s next?

1. Payments: Unauthorized is still limited by its payment solutions, so integrating a worldwide payment system has to remain our top priority. The aforementioned wire transfer method will come first, after which we will begin looking into ways to bring back card payments as well as (eventually) expanding to crypto.

2. New features: While the real-time chat continues to take shape, we will also be adding comments to Unauthorized videos in the near future. It’s past time we allowed viewers to engage with the content even if they didn’t catch the livestream. Naturally, the ability to write comments will be limited to paying subscribers.

3. New look: As the early access group knows, there has been a new design for Unauthorized in development for some time. This new frontend is enormously more modern, polished, and easy on the eyes compared to the current site, and we hope that you will all get to enjoy it before long.

Recap

This has been your Unauthorized sitrep for June 2025; we hope that any questions you might have about the recent changes have now been answered and that the current state of affairs is now clear to everybody.

Once again, massive thanks must go to all of you for your continued support and patience. Being able to work on such an immense, challenging, and frankly awesome project is a true privilege and we would not—could not—keep hammering away if it weren’t for each and every one of you.

We have now, together, overcome the fourth payment deplatforming in 5 years. Nobody can stop us. They can hurt Unauthorized, sure, and they can slow us down, but as long as we have this community to serve we will always find a way forward and we will always build back stronger than before.

Until next time, Happy Otter Month!
—Jordamøn