Three kinds of provider
Custom development
An agency or studio builds the product to your specification. Full control, longest path, and every later change is a project. Best when the product itself is your differentiation and you have an engineering budget to maintain it.
Aggregator with a wallet
A games aggregator that adds a wallet and a simple back office. Fast for slots-first products; retention, KYC review, player protection and multi-brand operations are often thin or bought from third parties.
Turnkey platform
A complete, configured product launched from a console: games, dual-currency wallet, entry routes, redemption review, retention and back office, per brand. iPlaySkillz is this type, with skill games native and aggregated content through a provider module.
The questions that separate providers
- Ledger: is every balance change an append-only row with its source, or a mutable balance field? Ask to see a redemption reversal on the ledger.
- Currencies: are Gold Coins, Sweeps Coins and bonus balances separate, and is the promotional balance spent first?
- Entry routes: can the no-purchase routes your rules require be configured per brand without a developer, and is each credit auditable?
- Redemption: does the queue show identity status, documents and a timeline in one screen, and is a rejection atomic with the wallet?
- Multi-brand: is a brand a first-class record with its own domain, theme, legal pages, wallets and players, or a theme switch on a shared database?
- Player protection: are bans checked on every request, is self-exclusion enforced by the platform, and are geo rules per brand?
- Skill games: is randomness seeded and reproducible, are sessions signed, are results settled once on the server, and can score rules reject implausible results?
- Third-party content: is the provider module isolated from the core ledger, with verified and idempotent webhooks?
- Retention: are rules, journeys, VIP tiers and rewards configured in the console or coded per brand?
- Release: are there separate development, staging and production environments with a promotion gate and rollback?
- Claims: does the provider attach regulatory status to the software itself? Software cannot hold that status; an operator in a market can. Prefer providers that describe controls rather than status.
- Proof: ask for a live console rather than slides, and for the settlement row of a real game run.
What to ask for on the demo
Ask to watch three things happen live: a brand being created and its domain check, a game run and the ledger row it produces, and a redemption request moving through review. A provider that can show those three in one session has a platform; one that cannot has a roadmap. On iPlaySkillz the demo is built around exactly those three.
Red flags
- Published launch timelines with no reference to your rules, market or content set.
- Licensing or compliance language attached to the software itself.
- Retention and promotions that require a developer for every change.
- One shared wallet or player table across brands.
- No answer to how a duplicate result submission is handled.
This guide does not rank named providers. It describes the questions; the answers are yours to collect on each demo.