A straight answer from a supplier with an obvious interest: build the parts your players see, buy the regulated plumbing underneath. Here is the reasoning, including where building genuinely does make sense.
Engineering teams estimate the software. A casino platform's cost is mostly the evidence around the software.
You can write a working wallet in a sprint. Writing one with double-entry postings, idempotency keys, pessimistic balance locking, integer-only money math, multi-currency support, daily reconciliation and a tamper-evident hash chain — and then documenting it to the standard a testing laboratory expects — is a different project entirely, and it never ends, because reconciliation is forever.
The same pattern holds for the RNG. Producing random numbers is trivial. Producing them from a NIST SP 800-90A construction with multi-source entropy, continuous statistical self-tests, process isolation, and the design documentation a lab will review is not.
| Layer | Recommendation | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Brand, site, lobby | Build | This is your product and your differentiation. Nobody should outsource it. |
| Onboarding, CRM, bonusing strategy | Build | Retention economics are specific to your market and audience. |
| Game content | Buy | Original games need art, math, engineering and certification per title. |
| RNG | Buy | Standards-based construction plus continuous testing plus lab documentation. |
| Wallet and ledger | Buy | Deceptively hard, permanently operational, and every bug is a money bug. |
| Crypto custody | Buy | Key management, sweeping, gas and solvency proof are specialist infrastructure. |
| Compliance engine | Buy | Rules change per market and must be enforced at runtime, not in policy. |
| Certification evidence | Buy | Assembling a dossier from scratch adds months before a lab will even engage. |
If your business is selling platform technology to other operators, then the platform is your product and buying it defeats the purpose.
If your target jurisdiction has requirements no supplier supports, you may have no choice — though it is worth confirming that is actually true first.
A format that does not exist yet may need to be built. That is a game studio decision, not a platform decision, and the two are separable.
On this comparison: other suppliers are described from their own public positioning, and capabilities change. This page sets out what we think is worth evaluating and how Slotty Labs answers it — verify current specifics with each supplier directly. Where another platform is the better fit, we would rather say so early.
Almost never in full. The parts that look simple — a wallet, an RNG, a round log — are where the certification burden concentrates, and getting them subtly wrong produces money discrepancies you cannot explain to a regulator. Building the front-end, the CRM and the brand experience is a much better use of the same engineers.
The wallet, consistently. Double-entry accounting with idempotency, pessimistic balance locking, multi-currency support and daily reconciliation is deceptively hard, and every mistake is a money mistake. RNG certification evidence is a close second.
Longer than the estimate, because the estimate usually covers the software and not the evidence. Math models, simulation output, RNG documentation, audit trails and responsible-gambling enforcement all have to exist before a laboratory will engage.
Everything your players actually see and everything that differentiates you: the site, the lobby, onboarding, CRM, bonusing strategy, and the brand. Buy the regulated plumbing underneath it.
The fastest way to price the build option honestly is to see how far the buy option gets you in an afternoon.