Starting an online casino costs a licence route, a platform, payment and game content fees, a team and a marketing budget. The platform is the easiest line to price: ours is €15,000 to set up and €6,000 a month, plus a share of gross gaming revenue. Everything else depends on your markets and your licence route, so the useful answer is a budget built one line at a time.
Most providers quote on request, which makes the question hard to answer from the outside. We publish ours, so the platform lines below carry real figures. The other lines carry what drives them, because a number we cannot stand behind would be worse than none.
What you pay once
A licence route
If you apply for your own licence, you pay the regulator's fees, the legal work to prepare the application, the company structure it requires and the time of the key people it assesses. Regulators publish their own fees. Anjouan's schedule, as published by the regulator and checked on 24 September 2026, is €17,828 for issuance and €17,828 for each annual renewal, the same for operator and supplier licences, and its application fees are non-refundable whatever the outcome. Our guide to the Anjouan gaming licence sets out the rest of what that regime asks for.
If you trade under an existing licence on a white label route, there is no application of your own. The licensee carries the licence and its obligations and prices them into the arrangement, which is why the upfront cost of a white label launch is lower.
Platform setup
Our setup fee is €15,000. Across the category, setup fees are reported at US$30,000 to US$80,000. Those are ranges reported across the category, not quotes from any one provider.
Setup usually buys the provisioning of your environment, your brand, the configuration of payments, games and compliance thresholds, and the integrations behind them. Ask what it excludes before you compare two numbers.
Payment onboarding and reserves
Payment providers underwrite you before they process anything, and some hold a rolling reserve against chargebacks for a period after launch. That is cash you cannot spend, so it belongs in the budget even though it is not a fee.
Working capital
Players deposit, win and withdraw before your revenue settles. You need enough cash to pay withdrawals promptly, fund bonuses and cover the months before the casino pays for itself. Underfunding this line is how a launch that looked profitable on paper stalls in its first quarter.
What you pay every month
The platform fee and revenue share
Our platform fee is €6,000 a month. On top of it we take a share of gross gaming revenue that tapers as you grow: 20% of monthly GGR up to €100,000; 18% from €100,000 to €300,000; and 16% above €300,000, each rate applying only to the GGR inside its own band.
Across the category, monthly fees are reported at US$5,000 to US$50,000 a month, with revenue shares of 10% to 30% of NGR. Compare carefully: those category shares are quoted on net gaming revenue, after bonuses and some costs, while ours is charged on gross. The same percentage means different money on each basis.
What our monthly fee and revenue share cover: player account management; game aggregation and catalogue sync; hybrid fiat and crypto wallet with a reconciled ledger; bonus engine with abuse controls; compliance tiers, audit trail and regulator evidence packs; back office, staff roles and Brand Studio; hosting, platform updates and the service level agreement; risk and fraud monitoring; and 24 hour technical support.
What they do not cover: CRM and campaign automation, customer data platform, business intelligence suite, affiliate management, payment processing fees charged by the payment providers and game content royalties agreed directly with studios. Those lines appear below as separate costs, and every one of them belongs in your budget whichever platform you choose.
Game content
Studios and aggregators take a share of the revenue their games generate. Rates depend on the studio, the game type and the agreement. This is agreed with the content side, not charged by the platform.
Payment processing
Every deposit and withdrawal carries a fee, set by the method, the market and your risk profile. Cards, bank transfers, e-wallets and crypto all price differently, and chargebacks add a cost of their own.
Identity and compliance checks
Verification, sanctions screening and source of funds checks are usually charged per check by the verification provider. The number of checks grows with sign ups, and more with markets that require enhanced checks.
People
Even with a platform that needs no developers on your side, someone has to own compliance, player support, payments and risk, and marketing. In a small team one person holds several of those roles, but each one costs time.
Marketing
Acquisition is usually the largest cost after launch: affiliate commissions, paid media where it is permitted, and the bonuses you offer new players. It is also the line founders most often leave out of the first budget.
Year one, worked
With us, the fixed platform fees for a first year come to €87,000: the setup fee and twelve monthly fees. The revenue share comes on top and scales with what the casino earns, and every line in the previous section is additional.
The cost calculator runs our revenue share at the GGR you expect and sets the year against an assembled stack of separate vendors, with the working shown.
Planning a launch? See what is still open
Ten questions about your licence, payments, games, compliance and team. The blueprint shows what is already in place, what could block your launch and your likely platform route.
No email to start. About four minutes. A work email opens the full blueprint.
White label or your own licence
The two routes spend money in different places.
White label has the lower upfront cost. There is no licence application, the payment and content relationships already exist, and you reach a trading casino sooner. You give up control of the regulatory relationship in exchange.
Your own licence costs more to start and more to keep: fees, legal work, a compliance function and ongoing reporting. You gain control over markets, payments and terms, and you license a platform to run underneath it. Our White Label against Turnkey Platform comparison sets the two routes side by side.
Costs that are easy to forget
- Bonuses. A bonus is a cost, and an abused bonus is a larger one. Terms the platform enforces on its own protect this line.
- Chargebacks and fraud. Budget for losses, not just for the tools that reduce them.
- Gaming duties. Some markets tax gambling revenue. Check each market you plan to serve.
- Dispute resolution. Some licences, Anjouan's among them, require a named alternative dispute resolution provider.
- Translations and support hours. Every new language and every extra hour of support coverage has a cost.
About these prices
Indicative. Final commercials depend on target markets, licence model, provider mix and volume. Scalara does not replace a dedicated CRM, CDP or BI suite. Our prices were last reviewed on 31 August 2026. Market ranges: Category ranges collected for the Scalara investor deck, August 2026. They are ranges reported across the category, not quotes from any single provider.
