How to add emotes on Kick(sizes, limits and the rules nobody reads)

# The specs, in one table

Everything below comes from Kick's own emote documentation rather than from a tutorial, and was re-checked on 29 August 2026^[1]. If you only came for the numbers, the table is the whole answer and you can stop reading after it.

One number in that table is more interesting than it looks. Sixty channel emote slots, available immediately, with nothing to qualify for. On Twitch, emote slots are rationed: you earn them by hitting Affiliate, then by climbing Sub Points milestones, and the count is tied to how many people pay you. Kick front-loads the whole thing. A channel that went live for the first time this morning has the same 60-emote capacity as one with 40,000 followers.

# Channel emotes vs subscriber emotes

These two get conflated constantly, including in most of the video tutorials currently ranking for this query. They behave differently in the one way that actually matters to viewers.

• Channel emotes work only inside your own chat. Anyone watching your stream can type them, subscriber or not. They are available the moment you create your channel.
• Subscriber emotes work everywhere on Kick. Someone who subscribes to you can use your sub emotes in any other streamer's chat, for as long as that subscription stays active.

That portability is the real argument for spending design money on sub emotes rather than channel emotes. A channel emote is decoration inside a room you already own. A sub emote is your channel's name travelling into rooms you do not own, carried by someone who chose to pay you. If you have a budget for exactly one commissioned emote set, that is where it goes.

When do subscriber slots actually open?

The gate on sub emotes is worth reading carefully, because Kick's phrasing here has aged. The emote article says subscriber emotes open for "Affiliates and Verified KICK Channels". Elsewhere, Kick's monetisation path is now described as the Creator step, which needs 5 cumulative streaming hours across a trailing 30 days and carries no follower requirement at all^[3]. The 250-follower gate sits at the later Partner step.

# Uploading: the actual click path

Both emote types live in the same place, which is not where most people look first.

1. Open your Streamer Dashboard.
2. In the left menu, under Channel, select Community.
3. Find either Channel Emotes or Subscriber-only Emotes.
4. Click the plus icon on the set you want to add to.
5. Choose your file.
6. Give the emote a name. This is the exact string viewers will type in chat.
7. Save.

Removing one follows the same route: hover the emote in that grid, click the trashcan.

The name field is the step people rush and then regret. Whatever you type becomes a chat command, and once your regulars have it in muscle memory, renaming it is a small act of vandalism against your own chat. Two habits are worth adopting before you upload anything. Prefix every emote with a short channel tag so your set clusters together in the picker and does not collide with the global emotes viewers already have. And keep the tail short — a viewer typing a fourteen-character emote name mid-conversation will simply stop using it.

# Why emotes get rejected or removed

This is the section the video tutorials skip entirely, and it is the one that costs real money when a commissioned set gets pulled.

Kick publishes a separate Emote guide covering content policy, and it is stricter on intellectual property than most streamers assume^[2]. Kick states that streamers must hold the rights to everything in an emote, and it names the prohibited categories directly.

• Assets or materials taken from other Kick streamers or channels.
• Artwork and photographs created by someone else.
• Names, logos and identifying marks belonging to organisations.
• The likeness of another person, including celebrities and public figures.
• Content lifted from other media.

Read that list against what actually gets uploaded. Emotes built from a celebrity's face, from a game studio's logo, or from another streamer's mascot are extremely common, and every one of them sits inside a named prohibited category. Kick's stated enforcement runs from immediate removal of the emote through warnings, channel restrictions, suspensions and bans for repeated or severe cases. The platform also reserves the right to remove this content at its own discretion, which means you do not get to argue transformative use.

# Design notes the spec table leaves out

A file can satisfy 500 × 500, PNG, under 1 MB, and still be a bad emote. The published spec is an upload constraint, not a design brief.

The gap is scale. You are drawing at 500 pixels and your viewers are reading at something far smaller, inline, against a chat that is scrolling past them. Kick does not publish the pixel size emotes actually render at in chat, so the only reliable check is empirical: shrink your artwork to roughly the height of a line of chat text, look at it on a phone, and see whether it still reads. Detail that survives at 500 px routinely turns to mud. Thin outlines vanish. Four-colour gradients become one grey blob. Facial expressions stop being legible at exactly the moment they need to be.

Animated emotes have a second constraint stacked on top: the whole GIF has to come in under 1 MB, and animation is expensive in bytes. That budget is what forces the compromises — fewer frames, a smaller palette, a shorter loop. Our guide to animated emote craft goes through the frame and palette trade-offs in detail, though note it is written against Twitch's size ladder rather than Kick's single 500 px upload.

If you need to get existing artwork to the right dimensions, our emote resizer runs entirely in your browser, though it outputs Twitch's three-size set rather than a single 500 × 500 file — take the largest output and scale from there.

# Third-party emotes: 7TV on Kick

A large share of the emotes you see in Kick chat are not uploaded to Kick at all. They come from 7TV, which supports Kick natively — and it is the only one of the three big emote extensions that does. BetterTTV and FrankerFaceZ remain Twitch-only.

This matters for one reason people miss: 7TV emotes are visible only to viewers who have the 7TV extension installed. Everyone else sees the raw text. So a 7TV set is not a replacement for uploading emotes to Kick — it is a layer on top, for the subset of your audience running the extension. Your Kick-native 60 are what the rest of your chat sees.

We have a full breakdown of how the three extensions differ, including slot counts and browser support, in our 7TV vs BTTV vs FFZ comparison. The short version: if you stream on Kick, 7TV is the default rather than a choice.

# Kick emotes vs Twitch emotes

The single-file upload is a genuine convenience. Twitch asks you to supply artwork that will be rendered at three separate pixel sizes, which means checking legibility three times. Kick takes one 500 px file. Less work, and one fewer way to ship something broken. Twitch's slot ladder is covered in our Twitch subscriber emotes guide.