A platform agreement is mostly boilerplate, and then there are about two pages that decide what you pay. Those two pages are usually a schedule at the back, written in a different voice from the rest of the document, and they are the only part worth reading twice.
The three lines
Nearly every commercial schedule in this market prices the same three things.
A setup fee. One payment, taken at signature or split against milestones, covering provisioning, configuration, integration work and getting you to a live environment.
A monthly platform fee. The recurring charge. It normally covers hosting, platform updates, the service level agreement and support, and it normally starts before you are trading.
A revenue share. A percentage of your gaming revenue, usually tapering downwards as revenue grows.
Our own figures for all three are published on the pricing page rather than quoted on request, so you can read them without a sales process. What follows applies to any provider's schedule, including ours.
The setup fee: what counts as setup
The number matters less than the boundary. Four questions:
- When is it due? At signature, at environment delivery, or at go-live. Tying part of it to go-live aligns the provider with your launch date rather than with your signature.
- What is in scope? Provisioning and standard configuration are always in. Data migration, custom reports, bespoke integrations and additional brands usually are not.
- What is the day rate for everything else? If there is no published rate for out-of-scope work, you will discover it at the worst possible moment.
- Is it per brand? If you plan more than one brand, this single question can be worth more than the headline fee.
The monthly fee: read the inclusion list, then read the exclusion list
Providers describe the monthly fee by what it includes. The more useful document is the list of what it excludes, and if the contract does not contain one, write one and ask them to confirm it.
Categories that commonly sit outside a platform fee:
- Payment processing fees charged by the payment providers themselves.
- Game content royalties agreed directly with studios.
- CRM and campaign automation.
- Customer data platform.
- Business intelligence and reporting suites.
- Affiliate management software.
- Additional environments beyond production, such as staging.
We say in public that Scalara does not replace a dedicated CRM, CDP or BI suite, because a cost comparison that pretends otherwise is not a comparison. Whoever you are talking to, get the same sentence from them in writing. The difference between two platform fees is often smaller than the difference between two exclusion lists.
Three further questions on the recurring line:
- When does it start? Environment delivery or first real player. The gap between those two dates is often three months, and three months of platform fee is a real number.
- How does it escalate? Annual uplift clauses are normal. An uncapped one indexed to something you cannot forecast is not.
- What happens if you pause? Some operators need to suspend a brand. Ask what a dormant brand costs.
The revenue share: the basis is the whole negotiation
This is the clause that decides your unit economics, and the percentage is the least important part of it.
Gross gaming revenue is stakes minus player winnings. It is a simple figure and hard to argue about.
Net gaming revenue is that figure after deductions. The deductions are where the money is. Commonly deducted: bonus cost, payment processing fees, game content royalties, chargebacks, affiliate commission, sometimes gaming duty. Every deduction you win moves the effective rate.
A rate on GGR and the identical rate on NGR are different prices. Establish the basis in the first commercial conversation, before anybody argues about the percentage.
Then check three mechanics.
Is the taper marginal or whole-band? A marginal taper applies each rate only to the revenue that falls inside its own band. A whole-band taper applies the lower rate to everything once you cross the threshold, which sounds better and is usually not, because it creates a cliff: at the top of a band, earning slightly more can cost you more. We treat our own taper as marginal and say so on the pricing page, with a worked example.
Is the band measured monthly or annually? A monthly measurement resets every month, so a seasonal business never reaches the lower rates. An annual measurement rewards a full year of volume.
Is it per brand or per group? If the bands are measured per brand, a group running four mid-sized brands pays the top rate on all four while a single brand of the same total size pays much less.
The clauses that cost money later
Beyond the three lines, five clauses regularly turn out to matter more than they read.
Minimum revenue commitment. A floor under the revenue share, payable whether or not you earn it. Common, negotiable, and dangerous if your launch slips.
Exclusivity. Whether you may run any brand on another platform during the term. If you are planning to test a second market with a different partner, this clause decides whether you can.
Term and auto-renewal. A three-year term with a ninety-day notice window and automatic renewal is a five-year term for anybody who is busy.
Change of control. What happens to the agreement if you sell the business, or if the provider is sold. Both directions are worth reading.
Service credits. Almost always capped at a share of the monthly fee, which means an outage on a Saturday night costs the provider a fraction of what it costs you. That is normal, and it is a reason to read the availability commitment as a signal about their engineering rather than as compensation.
Build the comparison the boring way
Once you have the schedules from two or three providers, put them into a single model rather than a table of headline rates.
Take your own revenue projection for year one. For each provider, calculate: setup, twelve months of platform fee from the date it actually starts, the revenue share under their basis and their taper, plus every line their exclusion list pushes back onto you. Then do the same for year two, when the setup fee has gone and the revenue share dominates.
The ranking usually changes between the two years, and it usually changes again once the exclusion lists are added. Our total cost of ownership calculator does this against our published figures and lets you switch the categories we do not replace on and off, so the comparison stays like for like.
Five questions to send before the first call
You can compress most of this into an email. Any provider worth a meeting will answer all five in writing.
- Is the revenue share calculated on GGR or NGR, and what exactly is deducted?
- Is the taper marginal or whole-band, and is the band measured monthly or annually, per brand or per group?
- What is your exclusion list for the monthly fee?
- Is the setup fee per brand or per group, and what is the day rate for out-of-scope work?
- What is the term, the notice period, and what happens to our data at the end of it?
Commercial terms always depend on markets, licence model and provider mix, so nothing anybody sends you is a binding quote until it is a term sheet. But the answers to those five questions are structural, not situational, and a provider who cannot give them quickly has not written them down.
If you want ours, they are already published.
