How To Choose The Right Online Casino Platform in 2024

What’s the online casino platform?

You got it right! This is the most critical element of your entire infrastructure.

You can connect or disconnect any piece of software fairly easy. But it’s a way more difficult to change an online casino platform.

Why do you need an online casino platform?

• It gives you comprehensive information about every player that joins your casino. You can check in-depth details of every customer, analyze behavior and block suspects.
• It also shows you key KPIs for your business like revenue, payouts and profit for your entire business.
• Dashboards, player management, marketing campaigns, bonus systems, payment systems, risk and fraud control, customer support, performance reports and payouts to your customers are all different elements of the platform.

Online casino platform is the headquarters of your online casino business

Your entire business will be managed from the platform by you and your team members, no matter what business you run.

It can be an online casino with live dealers, slot machines, virtual games or a sports betting business. You can run and manage all these offerings from a single platform.

How Much Do You Pay For An Online Casino Platform?

Choosing an iGaming platform is a crucial step for online casinos.

With a price between $10,000 and $100,000, you want to be sure you’ve made the right choice. Because if not, it can be very costly to correct things later.

That’s right!

The platform can cost you between $10,000 and $100,000. There are even more expensive solutions.

There are about one hundred platforms in online gambling industry. This is why it’s so critical to understand the difference!

The price is important because it can drastically increase your total investment

All platforms can be divided between three tiers.

• Tier-1 platforms cost up to 25,000 EUR. Relatively new businesses fit into this category. There are also some big companies that fit into this category like for example Betconstruct.
• Tier-2 platforms usually cost up to 50,000 EUR. Most of them are “One-Stop-Shops” and offer multiple solutions including payment providers and whitelabel services.
• Tier-3 platforms usually focus on well financed teams with a solid budget. Pragmatic platform is a good example, because it will cost you around 100,000 EUR

More expensive doesn’t mean always better

Our best clients – companies that generate tens of millions of dollars and generate thousands of new clients every day don’t have super expensive platforms.

It’s either they are at the stage where they can hire software developers to build their own platform. Or they are using something that doesn’t cost much, have all required features and good customer support.

Keep your startup costs as low as possible is a free advice you can use to build a successful online casino business.

Three critical elements of a good platform – price, features, and customer support

If you only get answers once a week on things that are important to your IT team, it can cost you money and reputation.

For example, a friend of mine chose one of the market leaders. But after contacting them to set up a meeting, he found that the platform considered him too small to answer his emails regularly (the person had a $400,000 bank).

This can also happen if you build your business in Asia, but the platform is in Europe. Without 24/7 support, you have to wait for your partners to wake up before you can solve a problem.

Imagine you have integration issues between the platform and your payment providers. Your casino will be down for hours before someone fixes the problem. You’ll lose money, customers and affiliates.

The way many platforms treat their customers also depends on the volume the operator generates

If you’re someone who makes $100,000.00 GGR, then your requests to improve things may end up in a long queue.

The same requests from a company making $800,000.00 may be handled immediately.

This is not how you want to be treated when you are just starting.

The best advice is to choose someone you can grow with.

Your appetite has to match available resources of the operator. Especially resources they can allocate to your project.

High price doesn’t always reflect the quality because of high maintenance costs

You should check where the platform is certified. That will give you an idea of the regulated markets you can work in. If you want to get into the regulated space, you’ll want to focus on well-certified platforms.

On the other hand, if you only want to work in an unregulated area, you can save a lot of money by choosing a platform that doesn’t have 30 certificates and twenty licenses.

It may cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to maintain them.

This is fairly easy to check, because this information is usually placed on a home page.

You don’t have to use a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Make sure you don’t overpay for something you don’t need.

Good iGaming platform has to reduce the cost of running online casino for you

Even though you can be successful with basic platforms functions, more advanced platforms make your life easier by introducing systems that can replace multiple people.

If you need two software developers to build a simple marketing campaign then it’s an overkill.

You will pay several thousand dollars just in salaries.

Good platforms have marketing systems my five years old kid can use to build a monthly promotion.

Discuss to your marketing team all the features you will use on daily basis and make sure your iGaming platform can deliver on expectations.

Do you want to accept crypto payments?

Things like crypto, and customer support availability can also be important. Most platforms offer crypto but only as a paid feature.

Content Management System is critical, because it helps you manage your website, marketing and digital assets. This is how you make promotions visible on your webpage.

Always check if the CMS is included in the offer, as some platforms charge a lot for it.

But before you can choose a platform, you need to contact all the providers, tell them your business plans, sign a non-disclosure agreement, and have a conversation to learn more about the platform.

Most online casinos offer different bonuses to keep their clients happy

Your iGaming platform has to have features that top-notch casinos offer.

Most platforms offer basic options like welcome bonus, free spins bonus, or no deposit bonus.

There are also platforms that offer extras and provide various gamification options and other ways to engage customers.

Bonus features you will need:

• Your tactics for attracting customers will depend on the sign-up bonuses (welcome bonuses) that you’ll set up. This is the biggest bonus your online casino is likely to offer to entice a customer away from your competition.
• Free spins can be offered to your customers on various occasions – you can share promotional codes, and offer free spins when your customers make deposits or when they simply sign up on your website.For example, you may want to engage people every Tuesday between 13:00 and 15:00 and offer them free spins in return.
• A first-deposit bonus that your players receive for their first deposit on your site. This is a big one, because it converts people from being non-payers to your active customers.
• A reload bonus is a bonus that’s offered to players who’ve already made a deposit with you in the past. This way you can reward your regular customers. It’s much cheaper to have a reload bonus to get a second deposit from your client than to acquire a new customer.

We have a post on how to promote your online casino and increase revenue by 25% (for free). You may want to read it if you want to make more money.

• The manual bonus can be given out separately. For example, you may want to reward your “old-timers” – players who’ve been playing at your casino for six months or longer. You can upload a list of such customers and give them $20 each.
• Another type of bonus that you can configure on different platforms is a special (combo) bonus. For example, you can create a first deposit bonus and combine it with free spins if your customers are active on certain days of the week.

Several platforms offer promotions, which are another tool for customer retention.

You can set up different rewards for your players who participate in contests. You can specify online games your players play to compete against each other and the type of reward, such as bonus money or free spins.

Manage your customers or they will steal your money

You need to have full transparency about each of your customers as soon as you open their profile.

A well-set-up profile should immediately show you what kind of player you’re looking at.

• The date of first registration, the country, the time they made their first deposit, and other critical information.
• IP information and a summary of all profiles with the same IP. This can be useful if you decide to pay bonuses to only one profile and avoid bonus hunters.
• You can lock and unlock profiles depending on the player’s activity, payout personal bonuses and view the entire financial history.

Do you want the AI to do the risk management?

Most platforms track all activity of every player. Information about each click can be obtained directly from the platform or provided by the platform administrators if needed.

Advanced platforms have AI systems to track behavioral activity and detect money laundering activities.

They are tracking dozens of proven tactics that scammers use to steal money from online casinos. And if there’s such a threat, your players will be marked accordingly for future investigation by your team.

You’ll make more money only if your marketing is good

The marketing campaigns you can run depend on the platform you choose. Some give you access to a simple text editor and a few tools for sending emails.

More advanced systems give you the ability to automate your marketing efforts and use multiple segmentation techniques to engage your customers in different ways.

You can apply different tags depending on what your customers do and then categorize them into different groups (e.g. VIP ), export to your CRM and configure different automations.

And all this without you having to lift a finger. This, of course, creates momentum and allows you to keep players engaged and communicate with them at all times to keep them loyal to you.

Some iGaming platforms don’t have a marketing module at all

This is smart. No casino software is good at everything.

Quality software providers focus on two or three things they are good at.

They provide an API integration instead.

It is also easier for your team to use a well know software providers than to re-learn everything from scratch.

Customer.io is a separate messaging platform that can be integrated with your iGaming platform. Most iGaming platform providers have integration with this tool.

Here’s a list of the most important features of customer.io

The point of the marketing module is to turn your customers into paying customers and increase their loyalty (and lifetime value) to your online casino.

Check if you get all online casino software providers you want

All major platform providers don’t just offer the platform alone. They also give you an offer for aggregation services.

Best online casino software is a must for casino operators.

Aggregators aren’t all the same. Even though they usually have a core offering – Evolution, NetEnt, Pragmatic Play, Microgaming, and others – that’s not enough for a successful business.

Check this post to learn TOP-10 online casino software providers.

Good questions to ask to iGaming platform:

1. What software providers do you have for my market? This will make platform reps think about your specific market instead of giving you a list of all providers they have.
2. When was the last time you added software providers? Check how active they are with new integrations. They should be adding several casino software providers every quarter.

Make sure you can connect multiple payment system providers

Nothing happens until there’s a sale. You can’t run your business without cash, which makes this module an important part of your platform.

Integration with any provider should be easy, smooth, and not expensive.

Different markets can have different payment system providers. Make sure it’s not a problem to connect with anyone you might need in the future.

Summary:

The platform is an essential part of online casinos. Choose it wisely, because it can take months before you can switch platforms.

You want to have people behind the platform that will help you succeed. By that I mean that they need to provide you with good support at all times and be available 24/7.

A high price doesn’t always reflect quality. You don’t need an expensive platform from well-known casino software developers to make it big. If you feel that people don’t respond decently and don’t stick to what they say, then maybe that’s not the best way to build business relationships. Even if you like the platform.

Have a platform with people you like to work with and who are willing to grow with you. They’re going to be supporting your business for years to come, and you want it to be a productive partnership for both parties.

A good solution will help you reduce the cost of running the online casino. Unique features are only good if they help you make more money, save money or save time.

Data integrity is key! You want to have easy access to all the numbers your online casino generates. Only then can you be sure that your affiliates are paid accordingly and that your business is profitable.

Casino software such as slot games, table games and live dealer games are usually delivered as a package and cannot be sourced from different partners. Make sure you have all the online casino games you need.