Bounty Board vs Keymailer for getting your game to creators

Ask almost anyone how to get an indie game in front of creators and Keymailer comes up. It has been the default answer for a decade, and mostly deservedly.

We build a competing product, so read this with that in mind. Everything below is sourced from Keymailer's own pages and terms plus third party reviews, and it ends with the cases where Keymailer is the better tool.

These two platforms overlap on key distribution, then split. Keymailer is built around inbound requests at scale. Bounty Board offers free key-only campaigns and an optional paid layer for defined work.

The direct answer

Keymailer is a key request marketplace. Creators with verified channels browse listed games, request a copy, and the studio decides who receives one. Keymailer's own promoter terms state that creators who receive a key "are not obligated to produce coverage", the design detail studios most often misread.

Bounty Board supports both routes. A studio can post a key-only campaign with no cash budget, subscription, or listing fee; creators apply, approved keys are delivered automatically, and coverage stays optional. If footage or another deliverable is required, the studio can run a cash or cash-plus-key campaign with a brief, deadline, and payment on approval. Paid work carries a standard 10% platform fee on each side of completed work. Choose Keymailer for a large, mature inbound key-request pool. Choose Bounty Board when you want free key distribution and paid deliverables in the same workflow. Plenty of studios should run both.

Keymailer, as of August 2026

Keymailer is operated by Keymailer Ltd, registered in England, and its publisher facing portal has been rebranded to Partnier while the creator side keeps the Keymailer name. The plain English opening of its promoter terms of use describes the model better than any marketing page:

• Keymailer lists games from public release data and collects expressions of interest from creators.
• Creators connect their channels. Keymailer verifies email and channel ownership, game library contents, playtime stats, and VR hardware, then computes influence scores, coverage type, and genre. Established creators also get a manual sample review it calls Accreditation.
• Studios answer those expressions of interest by sending keys through an encrypted distribution mechanism.
• Keymailer watches YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, and Facebook for new videos and streams and tells the studio when content appears.

The base service is free. Revenue comes from what the terms call chargeable feature upgrades: creator database access so you can send offers instead of waiting for requests, paid placement on the creator facing Discover page, and subscriptions that lift the cap on monthly requests, sold per game or through annual enterprise agreements.

The scale is real. Keymailer's site describes a network of 60,000 gaming influencers who chose to receive offers from promoters, a combined audience it puts at 2.4 billion, and roughly 200 new titles listed each month. Creator accounts are always free.

Prices are harder to pin down, and third party reviews disagree. An August 2026 Influencer Hero review lists a free plan capped at 10 engagements per month, an Indie Special at $24.99 per month, a single game subscription at $49 per month, a catalog plan at $99 per month, and managed bundles from $999. Cloutboost's comparison agrees on the monthly figure but quotes a different annual one. Check the pricing page before you budget.

What a free key buys, and what it does not

Two rules are worth internalizing before you plan a launch around key distribution.

The first is from Keymailer's promoter terms: creators who receive a key "are not obligated to produce coverage", and studios must not revoke a key because a creator did not cover the game, or because the coverage was unfavorable. The second is Steam's version of the same rule, in its curator guidance: there is no obligation to accept, play, or review a game, and a curator may play it and decide it is wrong for their audience.

Neither is a flaw. They are what makes creators willing to request keys at all. Together they mean a key program buys a chance at coverage, not coverage.

One useful published example comes from Magic Item Tech's postmortem for I Am Overburdened. About 900 distributed keys led to 130 activations on Steam and coverage from roughly 40 channels. For an earlier game, about 100 keys sent to a broad YouTube list produced almost nothing. The difference was targeting, not volume.

One cost never appears on a pricing page: triage. Because anyone can make a creator account, low-value requests are a known issue. Cloutboost notes that "since anyone can create an account and request keys, occasional scamming occurs", and the Influencer Hero review collects developer complaints about request volume. Keymailer's Steam library check, its accreditation review, and a creator terms clause banning key resale all exist to reduce that, but none eliminates the need to review requests yourself.

What Bounty Board does instead

A campaign on Bounty Board is one object: a game, a brief, an end date, and a reward, which can be keys, cash, or both.

A key-only campaign has no cash budget. Creators apply, the studio decides who receives a key, and approved keys are delivered automatically to campaign chat. Coverage stays optional, just as it does in a traditional key-seeding program.

For a paid campaign, a creator applies, you approve the application, they do the work, and you review it. When you approve the finished work, payment is sent to the creator's Stripe account, and Stripe holds the payout for 7 days so any dispute can be resolved before funds land.

The commercial terms are short:

• A standard 10% platform fee on each side of completed work, and only on completed work. A $100 task costs the studio $110 and pays the creator $90. No subscription, no credits, no listing fee.
• Standard campaigns have no upfront cost. You are charged when you accept work.
• Competitions and results based campaigns fund their budget up front through Stripe. Those funds are held by Bounty Board, and unused budget is refunded automatically when the campaign closes.

Game keys can also ride alongside cash in a paid campaign, delivered to the creator's campaign chat the moment you approve their application, so nobody manages a spreadsheet of codes.

Creators must clearly disclose paid campaign work and free product, including keys, in the content itself, in line with the FTC's guidance on material connections. Studios must not pay for a positive opinion, and campaigns must not request, compensate, or reward storefront reviews on Steam or any other store.

Side by side

Measurement is the sharpest difference

Keymailer's tracking exists to tell you that coverage happened, and it watches four platforms.

Bounty Board's measurement decides what gets paid, which is a higher bar and a narrower one. View based bonuses and results based payouts are measured automatically for YouTube and Twitch only. Work on TikTok, Instagram, X, and websites is reviewed and approved manually. So if your campaign lives on TikTok and you want a bonus that scales with views, we cannot do that today.

Choose Keymailer if

• You want the widest possible spread of keys. Keymailer publicly reports 60,000 influencers; Bounty Board had 261 creator profiles as of August 27, 2026.
• You want a mature key request workflow with store library checks, accreditation, and fraud controls already built. We have no store integrated key request marketplace at that scale.
• You need coverage tracking on TikTok and Facebook as well as YouTube and Twitch.
• Your creator budget is close to zero. A free tier plus real targeting effort is a legitimate strategy for a game with an obvious hook.
• You are coordinating press alongside creators, which sits in the same suite.

Choose Bounty Board if

• You need the work to exist: a brief, a deadline, a review step, and a price, with payment released only when you approve what was delivered.
• You want to offer keys at no cash cost first, then layer on a paid campaign when coverage needs to be contracted.
• You do not want a subscription. You pay 10% on top of work you accepted, and nothing in a month when nothing ships.
• You are running a ranked event. A competition funds its prize pool up front, so entrants can see the money exists before they invest hours, and unused budget is refunded automatically at close.
• You want keys to ride along with paid work rather than being the entire offer.
• You want public receipts. Creator profiles show real, verifiable earnings from completed campaigns, and our Boxville case study shows what that looked like across 8 paid creator activations.

The honest recommendation

For most studios the answer is not one or the other. It is order.

Run key distribution first and treat it as research. It tells you which creators raise their hand and whether anyone makes something good from your game without being paid to.

Then commission the specific thing. Once you know a format works, contract it: the video, the stream, the date, the price. That is why a studio can use the two tools in sequence.

If you are still weighing key distribution against paid campaigns, direct outreach, and managed work, compare all four approaches. When you are ready to write the brief, start with how to write a bounty creators want, and the studio guide covers how campaigns work from posting to payout.

Sources worth reading

• Keymailer: home
• Keymailer: creators
• Keymailer: pricing
• Keymailer: terms of use, publisher side
• Keymailer: terms and conditions, creator access
• Influencer Hero: Keymailer pricing and review
• Cloutboost: KeyMailer vs Lurkit vs Terminals vs Woovit
• GameDev.net: I Am Overburdened postmortem
• Steamworks: Curators and Curator Connect
• FTC: Disclosures 101 for social media influencers