Questions, answered

BracketBolt is a web app for running head-to-head voting tournaments. You list the entrants, share one link, and your audience picks a winner in every matchup until a single champion is left. Vote bars update live, so a bracket works as well on a stream or in a group chat as it does on a page someone checks once a day.

Single elimination. Every matchup has two entrants, the one with more votes advances, and the loser is out. Entrants are seeded, and when the field is not a power of two the top seeds get byes into the next round. Bye matches complete on their own, so nobody has to vote on a matchup with only one entrant.

A bracket needs at least 2 entrants. The free plan supports up to 63, and Pro raises that to 128.

Each match shows two entrants and a live vote split. How it closes depends on the timing mode you pick when you build the bracket.

In manual mode you close each match yourself when you are ready, and the winner moves into the next round automatically. In timed mode you set a round length, from 1 minute up to 7 days, with presets for 5 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour and 24 hours. Every match in the round closes when the clock runs out, and the next round opens on its own. Timed mode lets a bracket run unattended over a lunch break or a whole week.

You choose a tie-break rule per bracket. "Seed" sends the better-seeded entrant through, "random" picks one, and "extend" reopens the round for a short re-vote. An extension runs for the shorter of the round length and 30 minutes, and it happens once. If the match is still tied after that, the seed rule decides it.

Yes. From the edit page you can change the title, description, theme, timing and entrants. One thing to know first: if you change the entrant list, the bracket is rebuilt and the votes cast so far are reset, because the old results no longer describe the new matchups. Fix typos and swap entrants before you start promoting the bracket.

Yes. The create page has text-only starter brackets, such as best pizza topping and best anime opening, that you can load and edit. They contain no images, so there are no licensing surprises, and everything in them can be changed.

No. Anyone with the bracket link can vote on a phone, tablet or desktop without signing up. Accounts are for people who create brackets. The one exception is a bracket the creator has locked behind a password or an email prompt, which asks the voter for that first.

Once per match. The vote screen keeps a person to a single vote in each open matchup, and the same person can still vote in every other matchup in the bracket. Once a match closes, no more votes are accepted for it.

Each vote is checked against a salted one-way hash of the voter's IP address, a hash of a random voter cookie set in their browser, and a hash of their network prefix. That combination holds up when someone refreshes the page, switches Wi-Fi to mobile data, or clears a cookie but keeps the same network. Votes are also rate limited, and a verification check can appear if one address sends a burst of votes.

Creators get a vote integrity panel for their own brackets. If many votes come from the same network hash, they can disqualify that cluster so those votes stop counting. No system makes voting tamper-proof, so treat results from a bracket that went viral on a hostile corner of the internet with the same caution you would use for any online poll.

Yes. Vote bars show the live split for each matchup and move as new votes arrive, with no page refresh. That is part of the fun for a stream or a Discord server, and it is how the bracket shows current standings to everyone watching.

Yes. A creator connects their own Twitch or YouTube account to a bracket they own, and viewers then type !1 or !2 (or !left and !right) in chat to vote on the current match. Chat votes follow the same rules as web votes: one per person per open match, rate limits, and no votes on closed rounds.

Twitch votes arrive through Twitch's own chat event feed. YouTube has no equivalent, so the creator starts a listening session on the bracket page while they are live and keeps that page open.

Yes, to start. The free plan covers brackets of up to 63 entrants, live voting, automatic advancement, timed or manual rounds, shareable links, embeds and CSV import. Brackets created on the free plan can carry an advertising space for visitors, which is how the free tier is supported.

BracketBolt Pro is $4.99 per month or $39.99 per year, and you can cancel anytime. It unlocks brackets of 64 to 128 entrants, the OBS stream overlay, a custom logo and theme color, no advertising space on your brackets, optional voter email capture, and password protection for private brackets.

Pro is a creator feature. Your voters never need to pay for anything, and they never see a paywall.

You keep Pro until the end of the period you already paid for, and it does not renew. After that your account returns to the free plan. Your brackets stay, but Pro-only features such as 64+ entrants, the OBS overlay, custom branding, email capture and password protection may be disabled, and ads can appear on your brackets. Billing is handled by our payment partners, and the Terms of Service cover renewals and refunds.

Every Pro bracket has an OBS view at /b/your-bracket-slug/obs. It renders only the bracket tree on a fully transparent background, with no header, buttons or voting controls, so it composites cleanly over your scene.

In OBS, add a Browser source, paste that URL, and set the width and height to match your canvas (for example 1920 by 1080). Because the page background is transparent, you do not need a chroma key. The view updates live as votes come in. Open the bracket page while signed in as the owner and use the OBS view button to get the exact link.

The OBS overlay is a Pro feature. On a free bracket the link shows a short notice instead of the bracket, with an upgrade button for the owner.

Open your bracket as its owner, find the chat voting panel, and connect your Twitch account. You approve the chat permissions on Twitch's own sign-in screen, and from then on chatters can type !1 or !2 (or !left and !right) to vote on the featured match. The panel shows whether chat is live and the most recent command that came through, so you can confirm it works before you go on air.

If you connected before and chat voting stopped working, disconnect and connect Twitch again so it asks for the current permissions.

Connect your YouTube account from the same panel, then press Start listening while your stream is live. The bracket page reads your live chat on a short interval and counts the !1 and !2 commands it finds, so keep that page open during the stream. When the stream ends, stop listening.

Chat votes go to the featured match: the first ready matchup in the current round in timed mode, or the first open matchup in manual mode. Close it, and chat moves to the next one. A chatter gets one vote per open match, tracked through a one-way hash of their platform ID, not their username.

In the bracket builder, choose Import list or CSV. You can paste one name per line, or upload a CSV or TSV file of up to 200 KB. A CSV can have a name column, an optional image_url column and an optional seed column. Headers such as entrant or title also work for names, and comma, semicolon and tab delimiters are detected automatically.

You get a preview before anything is applied, with warnings for rows that cannot be used. Duplicate names are skipped, image links must be full http or https URLs, and the import stops at the entrant limit. If you include a seed column, those seeds are used for the bracket order.

Yes. Every bracket has a Share menu with a ready-to-paste iframe snippet. It points to a compact live view at /embed/your-bracket-slug that shows the bracket and its current results. Paste the snippet into a blog post, a website builder or a community page that allows iframes.

Embeds are allowed on any site, but only the embed pages are. The rest of BracketBolt refuses to load inside other sites' frames, which protects sign-in and account pages from clickjacking. If a bracket is password protected, its embed shows a lock message and never reveals the entrants.

Copy link, the device's native share sheet, quick posts to X, Reddit and Facebook, a Discord-ready message, and the embed code. Brackets also generate preview images for link cards, so a shared link shows the title and current matchup in chats and on social sites.

Voters do not need an account, and a vote is never linked to a BracketBolt account, even if the voter happens to be signed in. We store which entrant was chosen in which match, when, and a few salted one-way hashes used to enforce one vote per match. A hash cannot be turned back into an IP address, but it is still a pseudonymous identifier rather than a fully anonymous one, so we describe it that way in the Privacy Policy.

Not raw ones. For voting we keep only salted hashes of the IP address and the network prefix. Like any website, our hosting and database providers handle standard request data such as IP addresses for security and reliability. The Privacy Policy lists those providers.

Creators see vote counts for their own brackets, a best-effort unique-voter estimate, how many votes came from the web, Twitch and YouTube, and truncated hashes in the integrity panel. They cannot see raw IP addresses or who a particular person is. If a creator on Pro turns on email capture, they can also see the email address each voter typed in. The bracket tells voters before they vote, so skip that prompt if you do not want a creator to have your address.

The vote itself stores only a hash of your platform ID and the source (Twitch or YouTube), not your handle. The creator's connection keeps one overwritten "last seen" line, such as a display name and command, so they can see that chat voting is working. There is no running list of who voted for what.

Signed-in creators can delete individual brackets, and delete their entire account from the account page. For anything else, such as a question about stored data, write to support.bracketbolt@gmail.com and we will help.

Email support.bracketbolt@gmail.com. Include the link to your bracket and a sentence on what you expected to happen. A screenshot helps for display problems. Billing questions, bug reports and feature requests are all welcome at that address.