Most platform selection processes start with a feature grid and end in a stalemate, because every provider ticks every box. The four questions below are the ones that actually separate providers, and none of them appears on a feature grid.
Whose licence do you trade under?
This is the first question because it decides the other three. There are two shapes of answer.
If you trade under the provider's licence, you are on a white label route. The provider holds the regulatory relationship, so it also holds the final word on who may play, which markets are open, and what happens when a regulator asks a question. That route reaches a live environment fastest, and it is the right answer if you do not hold a licence today and will not hold one this year.
If you trade under your own licence, you are on a turnkey route. You keep the regulatory relationship, the payment contracts and the responsibility. The provider supplies the platform layer underneath. That route takes longer to start and gives you more control over everything that follows.
Ask a provider which of these they are selling. If the answer is not a clean sentence, they are selling both and have not decided which one you are buying. Ask again in writing.
Two follow-up questions are worth more than any feature list:
- If we obtain our own licence later, what does the move cost, and what moves with us?
- If your licence lapses or its scope changes, what happens to our brand?
A provider who has thought about the second question will answer it without flinching. Our own answers are on what the licence covers and on the two routes side by side.
Who owns the player data, and where does it live?
The honest version of this question is simpler: if the relationship ends badly, what do you walk away with?
Three answers are common in this market.
A tenant on shared infrastructure. Your brand is a configuration inside a system many operators share. This is the standard white label arrangement, and it is not a bad thing in itself. It is exactly why the route is fast and cheap to start. But your player records live in a database you do not control, and the export you get on exit is whatever the provider is contractually obliged to give you.
A dedicated schema or instance. Your data is logically separated inside the provider's estate. Better for isolation, and usually the same answer on exit: you get an export, not the system.
A private copy of the platform. The whole platform runs on infrastructure you control, holding your own player records and financial history. That is the model we sell to licensed operators as private platform copies, and it changes the exit conversation completely, because there is nothing to export.
Whichever model you buy, get three things into the contract: the export format, the notice period for requesting one, and who pays for it. Those three lines are worth more than any clause about uptime.
How is the money actually priced?
Almost every provider in this market prices the same three things, and almost every provider presents them differently.
- A setup fee. One payment covering provisioning, configuration and getting you live.
- A monthly platform fee. The recurring charge for hosting, updates, the service level agreement and support.
- A share of revenue. A percentage, usually tapering as revenue grows, and calculated on either gross gaming revenue or net gaming revenue.
The trap is the third line, and specifically the basis. Gross gaming revenue is stakes minus winnings. Net gaming revenue is that figure after deductions, and the deductions are the negotiation: bonus cost, payment processing fees, game content royalties, sometimes affiliate commission. A rate on GGR and the same rate on NGR are different prices. Ask which basis, ask which deductions, and put both in the term sheet.
Three further questions change the total materially.
- Is the taper marginal, or does it reprice everything? A marginal taper applies each rate only to the revenue inside its own band. A whole-band taper applies the new rate to all of it once you cross a threshold. The second creates a point at which earning more money costs you more money.
- What is charged per brand? Setup fees and monthly fees are sometimes per brand and sometimes per group. If you plan to run three brands, that difference is the whole budget.
- What sits outside the fee entirely? Payment processing fees, game content royalties, CRM, business intelligence and affiliate software usually do. A platform fee that looks low against one that looks high often loses once those lines are added.
We publish our own indicative setup fee, monthly fee and revenue share rather than quoting on request. Most providers quote on request, which is a legitimate commercial choice, but it does mean you cannot compare anything until you are already inside a sales process with three of them.
What does leaving cost?
Nobody asks this in a first meeting and everybody wishes they had. Four lines to settle before signature.
- Notice period. How long from the day you say you are leaving to the day you can stop paying.
- Data export. Format, scope and timing. Player identities, verification evidence, wallet and transaction history, bonus state and the audit trail are five separate things, and a provider may be willing to hand over some and not others.
- Verification carry-over. If your players verified their identity on the old platform, does the evidence transfer in a form the next provider can accept, or do your players verify again? Re-verification is the largest single source of churn in a migration.
- Domain and brand. Who holds the domain registration, the certificates and any app store listings.
We wrote up what actually moves and what breaks in what a casino platform migration actually involves.
Who else runs it, and in which markets?
Ask for two operators trading on the same version of the platform you would be on, in a market close to yours, and ask to speak to one of them.
Two things make this question useful rather than ceremonial.
The first is the version. A provider with a long customer list may be running several forks of its own software, and the reference you are given may be on a build that is three years old. Ask which version each named operator is on and whether it is the one you would get.
The second is the market. A platform that has never carried traffic in your jurisdiction has never met your regulator, your payment rails or your players' habits. That is not disqualifying for a younger provider, and it should change what you agree: a shorter first term, a pilot brand, and exit terms you would be happy to use.
A vendor who cannot turn a logo into a conversation is showing you a logo.
What a feature comparison is still good for
Once those four questions are settled, a feature comparison becomes useful rather than decorative. Three areas are worth reading closely, because they are where implementations differ most.
Compliance and the wallet. Ask whether the wallet reads a player's compliance standing before money moves, or whether compliance is a report somebody reads afterwards. The difference shows up the first time a player who should not have been paid is paid.
The audit trail. Ask to see it. Ask whether player actions, staff actions and system actions land in the same stream on the same clock, and whether you can produce a regulator-ready extract without engineering help.
Brand and content control. Ask who can change the lobby, the promotions, the translations and the game visibility, and how long a change takes to reach players. If the answer involves a ticket and a release window, budget for it.
How to test a demo
A demo is a sales asset. Turn it into evidence with four requests.
- Ask them to create a new brand in front of you, from an empty environment, and to stop narrating while they do it.
- Ask them to show one player record end to end: identity, verification state, wallet, bonus, decisions, and the audit entries those actions produced.
- Ask them to fail something on purpose. Reject a withdrawal, block a deposit, expire a bonus. Watch what the operator sees and what the player sees.
- Ask which of the screens you have just seen are in production today and which are in active development. Write the answer down.
Our own recordings sit in the demo centre with no form in front of them, so you can run that test on us before you speak to anybody.
Write one page before you shortlist
Before you compare providers, write a single page that answers four things: which licence we will trade under, who will own the player data, what the money model costs on our own revenue projection, and what leaving would cost in month eighteen.
Take that page into every meeting. It is the fastest way to find out which providers have thought about your business and which have thought about their pipeline.
If you want to run those questions against us, book a platform demo and bring the page.
