Retention software for online casinos is priced in three ways: per user seat, as a share of your gross gaming revenue, or as a subscription based on volume. None is wrong in every case. Which one hurts you depends mostly on your ARPU and the size of your team. I run Sellrise, which uses the third model, so I will state my bias up front and then try to be fair to the other two. I will not quote any competitor's prices here: I do not know their current terms and they change.
What are the three ways casino CRM is priced?
- Per seat. You pay for each person on your team who logs in. Cost grows with headcount.
- Share of GGR. The vendor takes a percentage of your gross gaming revenue, or of the revenue attributed to their tool. Cost grows with your success.
- Subscription by volume. A fixed monthly fee tied to how many active players you have, with the whole team included. Cost grows with the size of your base.
Many real contracts mix these, with a platform fee, per-seat add-ons and usage charges for messaging. That is why the headline number is rarely the number you end up paying. Ask for the total for your own player base and team, on paper.
When does per-seat pricing work, and when does it hurt?
Per-seat pricing is easy to understand and works when the team is small and each seat produces a lot of revenue. It hurts in two situations.
- Your ARPU is thin. In a Tier-3 market a player may be worth only a few dollars, so any tool whose cost scales with people and not with value quickly eats the margin it was meant to protect.
- You want more people to see the data. Retention managers, VIP managers, affiliate managers and call centre supervisors all benefit from the same forecasts. If every extra login costs money, the data stays with two people.
If you are choosing a per-seat tool, ask what counts as a seat, whether read-only users count, and what happens to the price when you hire.
Is a share of GGR a good deal?
Sometimes it is, and I would not dismiss it. A revenue share lowers the upfront risk: if the tool does nothing, you pay little. For an operator with no budget to experiment, that is real value.
The downsides come later. The percentage keeps being paid on revenue you would have earned anyway, and it is hard to separate what the tool contributed from what the market or your marketing did. Success makes the tool more expensive, and leaving the vendor means renegotiating from a weak position.
If you accept a share model, insist on a clear definition of which revenue it applies to, how attribution is measured, and a control group so that the measured effect is tied to the tool and not to everything else.
How does Sellrise price its subscription?
Plainly, and I will give you the numbers because they are on our site:
- Core, forecasts and analytics: from $1,500 per month when paid quarterly, or from $2,000 per month when paid monthly. This covers up to 10,000 active players per month.
- Next tier, up to 30,000 active players: quoted for you.
- Modules, for retention scenarios, traffic quality and call analytics: from $500 each.
- Paid channels, SMS, messengers and calls: at cost.
- Integration and support: included.
An active player is a player with a deposit or at least one bet in the month. The whole team is included, with no per-seat fee, and there is no share of GGR.
As arithmetic, if you were at the very top of the core tier on the quarterly plan, $1,500 across 10,000 active players is $0.15 per active player per month. Your real figure depends on where you sit in the tier, and I am showing the calculation so you can run your own, not claiming that is what you will pay.
What are the downsides of a volume subscription?
Two honest ones. First, you pay the fee even in a month when the tool does little, so you need confidence that it works. That is the reason we run a pilot with a control group before you commit: you see the number on your own players first. Second, volume tiers mean a jump in price when your base grows past a limit. Ask where the tier boundaries are and what happens just above them.
On the other side, a flat fee makes budgeting simple, and it removes the pressure to limit who can look at the forecasts.
What hidden costs should you ask about?
Whatever the pricing model, put these questions to every vendor in writing:
- Is integration billed separately, and who does the work on your side?
- What data do you need, where is it stored, and is it kept separate from other clients' data? (For Sellrise: four tables by Player ID, and a separate database for every client.)
- Are messaging channels included or billed on top, and at what margin?
- What does support cover, and is it extra?
- What does it cost to add a module, a market or a team?
- What happens to the data and the price if you leave?
Integration cost is the one that surprises people. At Sellrise it is at our cost. How long a connection takes depends on how your platform exports data, and our engineer estimates it on the first call.
Does the pricing model change how a vendor behaves?
Yes, and it is worth thinking about before you sign. A per-seat vendor earns more when you add users, so it has a reason to push adoption inside your team but none to make each user more effective. A GGR-share vendor earns more when revenue rises, which sounds aligned with you, but it also has a reason to claim credit for revenue you would have earned anyway. A subscription vendor earns the same whether you grow or not, which means its incentive is to keep you renewing, and the only honest way to do that is to show a measured result.
None of this makes any vendor dishonest. It tells you what to check. With seats, ask about adoption. With a revenue share, ask about attribution. With a subscription, ask how the result was measured and by whom.
How should you decide?
Start from your numbers, not from the model. Write down your active players, your ARPU, the number of people who would use the tool, and the budget you can commit for three months. Then ask each vendor for a quote against those figures and compare the total, not the headline.
Then insist on a test. Whatever the pricing, you should be able to measure the effect on your own players against a control group before the larger commitment. A month, one metric (average turnover per player), group sizes agreed up front. A vendor who will not agree to that is asking you to pay for a promise.
If you want to see how this looks for specific alternatives, our comparison pages explain where each approach fits without quoting anyone's terms. To see the product, open the demo or start a pilot.