---
title: Why Overlabels
section: Getting started
description: Overlabels is a third-party data normalization engine for Twitch. Donations, subs, bits, followers - it all becomes math you can work with.
heading: Why Overlabels
lead: Overlabels is a third-party data normalization engine for Twitch and the services around it. Donations, subs, bits, followers - it all becomes math you can work with.
canonical: https://overlabels.com/help/why-overlabels
---
If that sentence excited you, you're in the right place. Strap in.
## Why being third-party matters a lot
Overlabels doesn't care where your donation came from. StreamLabs, Ko-fi, Fourthwall,
Twitch Bits - they're all just *money that showed up*. We normalize every payload into a common shape and
expose it as a Control you can reference anywhere in your template.
Overlabels *loves* numbers. Because numbers mean math, and math means you can actually *do* something
with your data instead of just rendering whatever opinionated widget your alert provider decided to ship
this quarter.
## Who was the last person to donate, across *every* service?
One function:
```
latest(
c.streamlabs.donations_received_at, c.streamlabs.latest_donor_name,
c.kofi.donations_received_at, c.kofi.latest_donor_name,
c.fourthwall.donations_received_at, c.fourthwall.latest_donor_name,
c.bmac.donations_received_at, c.bmac.latest_donor_name,
c.throne.donations_received_at, c.throne.latest_donor_name,
c.twitch.cheers_received_at, c.twitch.latest_cheerer_name
)
```
Calmly outputs the name of the last person who gave you money, across five donation services and Twitch
bits. No other overlay or alert service on the market does this, and with Overlabels it's just another
function. (And we're adding more integrations all the time.)
Every control Overlabels tracks gets an automatic `_at` companion - a Unix timestamp of when that value
last changed. `latest()` walks through (timestamp, value) pairs and returns the value whose timestamp is
the largest. Same mechanism gives you `oldest()`, `max()`, and `min()`.
## Add up every donation this stream (and make sense of Bits)
Twitch Bits are 100 Bits = 1 USD, which is a math problem everyone else seems to just... give up on. Drop
an Expression Control into your overlay and unleash:
```
c.kofi.donations_received +
c.streamlabs.donations_received +
c.fourthwall.donations_received +
(c.twitch.cheers_this_stream / 100)
```
That's a workable USD number, composed from five providers and a currency conversion, updating live as
events arrive. You could keep going - weight each source, compute a 1-hour rolling average, trigger a
goal celebration when the combined total crosses a threshold. It's just math.
## Controls: the soul of the machine
There's a SICK implementation of Controls in Overlabels. A Control is a named, typed, live-updating value
you can reference anywhere in your template. Seven types:
- **Text** - strings you can update from the dashboard or chat
- **Number** - integers or floats with min/max constraints
- **Boolean** - toggles for show/hide logic
- **Counter** - increment/decrement with chat commands or API
- **Timer** - countup / countdown / countto, ticks locally on the overlay
- **Random** - picks a new value every N ms within a range
- **Expression** - the big one. Math over every other value in the system.
Service-managed Controls (Ko-fi, StreamLabs, Fourthwall, Overlabels Mobile...)
auto-update from their source and cannot be manually edited - the data is *real*. User Controls are yours
to fiddle with. Either way, every Control can be read by any Expression and targeted by any conditional.
Want to compare your follower count to your subscriber count? Want to fire an alert when the combined
Fourthwall + Ko-fi total crosses €100 in a single stream session? Want to flash a boolean ON when
your bits-per-minute spikes above your stream average? You have the building blocks. Read
[/help/controls](/help/controls) for the full list.
## But wait, what about `[[[if:`?
If? If not? If larger? If smaller? Oh yeah, we gotchu. Conditional engine: built in.
```
[[[if:followers_total >= 1000]]]
1K+ followers!
[[[elseif:followers_total >= 100]]]
Growing strong with [[[followers_total]]] followers
[[[else]]]
Help us reach 100 followers!
[[[endif]]]
```
Full comparison operators, boolean logic, nested branches, event-scoped conditions, even conditional
styling inside `