Every score on this site is calculated, not assigned. The inputs are facts we can check and you can check too. The formula is below in full, weights included, and it is applied to every brand in the catalogue without exception.
We publish it because the alternative is asking you to trust a number with no stated basis — which is exactly the thing that makes review-site ratings worthless.
What goes into the score
| Component | Maximum | How it is calculated |
|---|---|---|
| Market coverage | 3.2 | 0.22 per country where the operator accepts players |
| Payment coverage | 2.6 | 0.30 per supported payment method |
| Game studios | 1.9 | 0.30 per named content provider |
| Licensing | 1.2 | 0.45 per licence from a major regulator, 0.30 for each other licence |
| Product breadth | 0.45 | live dealer 0.15, crypto support 0.15, sportsbook 0.15 |
| Operating history | 0.4 | 0.04 per year since launch |
| App availability | 0.25 | 0.10 per native platform, Android and iOS |
The maximums add up to exactly 10.0. Each row is capped independently, so a hundred payment methods score the same as nine. The components are summed and the total is rounded to one decimal place, which is the number you see.
Major regulators for the purposes of the licensing row: the UK Gambling Commission, the Malta Gaming Authority, Germany's GGL, Brazil's SPA, the Ontario and US state regulators, Sweden's Spelinspektionen, the Danish Gambling Authority and Portugal's SRIJ.
Why coverage carries the most weight
This is a catalogue of packages distributed outside the Play Store, and most people reading it are in markets the store does not serve. For them the first two questions decide everything: does this operator accept players from my country, and does it take a payment method I actually have.
A UK Gambling Commission licence is an excellent thing and worth nothing at all to someone in Dhaka who cannot open an account. Weighting the score by European regulatory quality would produce a ranking that is technically defensible and useless to the person reading it, headed by operators they cannot sign up with.
So coverage leads, payment rails come second, and the catalogue of games third. Licensing still counts, and a brand with several strict regulators still gains on one holding a single offshore permit — it is simply no longer the factor that decides the order.
This is an editorial choice and not a neutral one. It is stated here so you can disagree with it: the components are listed separately above, and every brand page lists its licences, so you can weigh them higher than we did.
What is deliberately excluded
Bonus size. Welcome offers change every few weeks and differ by country. A ranking built on them would need re-sorting constantly around numbers we cannot independently verify. For most operators in this catalogue we do not publish a bonus figure at all, for the same reason.
User ratings. We do not have them. Inventing a star average, or scraping one from elsewhere and presenting it as ours, would be fabrication — and marking up a non-existent rating in structured data is the kind of thing search engines remove sites from results for.
Commercial terms. We earn affiliate commission from some operators listed here. It does not enter the formula and it does not change the order. No operator can buy a position or an adjusted score, and none of the numbers on this site is set by hand. The affiliate disclosure explains the arrangement.
Limits worth stating
The score reflects what is verifiable from the outside. It cannot measure withdrawal speed in practice, support quality, or how an operator behaves in a dispute — those need data we do not have.
It does not measure how much protection you have. Weighting for reach means a brand can rank high on one offshore licence. Licensing decides what happens when something goes wrong: a UK or Malta regulator will take a complaint about a refused withdrawal and can compel an answer, while an offshore permit usually gives you an email address and a longer wait. The licensing row is on every brand page for exactly this reason. Read it before depositing, whatever the total says.
Counts depend on how thoroughly we catalogued a brand. Three of the seven components count list entries. Our lists are the methods and studios we could confirm, not everything an operator runs, so a brand we researched in more depth can out-score a comparable one we covered more thinly. We are working through the catalogue to even this out.
Treat it as a starting filter, not a verdict. The details on each operator's page are there so you can weigh the parts that matter to you differently than we did.