Two ways an aggregator can bill you: invoice you at the end of the month for a percentage of GGR, or take the fee from a prepaid balance as rounds settle. The difference sounds small. It changes your cash flow, your budgeting, and how painful a bad month feels. Here is how both models behave with real numbers worked through.
How monthly GGR invoicing works
The classic model. You integrate, your players play all month, and in the first days of the following month you get an invoice for, say, 6% of whatever GGR the aggregator’s games generated. You pay it by bank transfer, usually within 7 to 30 days depending on the contract.
It is common in the industry for this model to come with extras attached. A setup fee to start the integration. A monthly minimum, so if your GGR is low you still owe a floor amount. Sometimes a security deposit held against your invoices. None of that is exotic; most operators we talk to have signed at least one contract with some combination of the three.
The appeal is obvious: you pay nothing until revenue exists. The problems show up later.
How a prepaid balance works
With casino201 you top up a balance first, in BTC, ETH or USDT, in chunks of $500, $1,000, $1,500 or $2,000. The 6% fee is then deducted from that balance as game rounds settle, in real time. Every cent of the balance is spendable, down to $0.01. There is no setup fee and no monthly minimum.
One clarification that matters: crypto is only how the operator tops up the casino201 balance. Your players never touch crypto. The aggregation supports all fiat currencies, so your cashier stays exactly as it is.
The practical result is that the fee stops being a payable and becomes a meter. You watch it run down on the dashboard next to balance, games and GGR, all in real time.
The cash-flow difference, with numbers
Say your operation generates $20,000 GGR in a month through aggregated games. Fee at 6%: $1,200. Here is how the two models handle that same $1,200.
| Monthly invoicing | Prepaid balance | |
|---|---|---|
| When you pay | Invoice arrives early the following month, due in days or weeks | Deducted live, as each round settles |
| Cash position during the month | You hold player money plus the unpaid fee liability | Fee already covered, balance shrinks visibly |
| End of month | $1,200 bill to fund from that month’s cash | Nothing owed, roughly $1,200 already spent from balance |
| Extras common in the industry | Setup fee, monthly minimum, deposit | None |
On invoicing, that $1,200 sits in your books as a liability you have to remember to keep liquid. In our experience this is where smaller operators get bitten: a strong month produces a strong invoice the month after, right when you have reinvested the winnings into marketing. The invoice does not care that the money is gone.
On prepaid, the fee is spent before you can spend it on anything else. That is the whole point. You can never owe the aggregator money you no longer have.
Worked example: $20,000 GGR on prepaid
Same operator, $20,000 GGR, $1,200 fee. The coverage math is simple: $1,000 of balance covers about $16,667 of GGR, because $1,000 divided by 0.06 is $16,666.67.
So how do you cover $20,000 of GGR with the available top-up sizes?
- Top up $1,000. Covers about $16,667 GGR. Not enough alone.
- Add $500. Covers about $8,333 GGR. Combined coverage: about $25,000 GGR.
- Total prepaid: $1,500. Total fee capacity: $1,500.
At $20,000 GGR the actual fee is $1,200, so after the month you have $300 of balance left, still spendable. Next month you might only need a $500 or $1,000 top-up to get back ahead of your expected GGR.
The habit we would build: top up to cover your expected GGR plus a buffer, not to the exact cent. If you expect $20,000 GGR, $1,500 prepaid is the right fit. If you expect $30,000 (a $1,800 fee), a single $2,000 top-up covers about $33,333 of GGR and leaves some headroom.
Worked example: a soft launch on $500
Now the smaller case, and the one where prepaid is clearly better. You are soft-launching a brand. You expect modest traffic. First month does $5,000 GGR.
Fee at 6%: $300.
| Item | Amount |
|---|---|
| Top-up | $500 |
| GGR in month one | $5,000 |
| Fee deducted (6% as rounds settle) | $300 |
| Balance remaining | $200 |
The $200 stays on the balance, spendable down to the cent, for month two. If month two does another $5,000 GGR, that is another $300 fee: $200 from the leftover balance plus $100 from a fresh top-up. A $500 top-up covers it and leaves you $400 in hand again.
Compare with the invoicing model as it commonly exists in the industry. On $5,000 GGR the 6% fee is the same $300, but if the contract has a $500 monthly minimum, you pay $500. Add a setup fee and month one costs you more than the fee itself. For a soft launch, where the entire point is to spend as little as possible while you learn, minimums and setup fees are the wrong shape of cost.
What a bad month does to each model
This is where the two models diverge the most.
On invoicing, a bad month still generates an invoice. Lower, sure, but the common industry minimums mean there is a floor you pay regardless. And the invoice lands after the bad month, when cash is tightest. Bad month, then a bill for the bad month. Operators who have lived through a negative swing know how that feels.
On prepaid, a bad month just means the balance drains slower. If GGR halves, the fee halves, automatically, with no renegotiation and no minimum to argue about. If you have a genuinely terrible month and GGR drops to near zero, your balance simply stays put. The money you prepaid is still yours, still spendable, waiting for traffic to come back.
There is a subtle budgeting benefit here that people miss. Prepaid forces the fee into your cost planning up front, like hosting or licensing. Invoicing lets you pretend the fee is a future problem. We would take the forced honesty every time.
When the balance runs low
The failure mode of prepaid is obvious: what if the balance hits zero mid-month and games stop? Two things prevent that.
First, the dashboard shows balance and GGR in real time, so you can see the runway. If you know you do about $16,667 GGR per $1,000 of balance, one glance tells you how many days you have left.
Second, casino201 sends Telegram alerts when the balance runs low. You get the warning before it becomes an outage, and topping up takes about two minutes from the dashboard. In practice the loop is: alert arrives, someone on the team sends a top-up, done. If you run several brands through one integration, the balance and the alerts cover all of them, so there is one place to watch.
Our advice: treat the low-balance alert as the trigger, not the deadline. If your monthly GGR is stable, you will learn your burn rate within two or three months and can top up on a schedule instead of reacting to alerts.
Which model suits which operator
Monthly invoicing suits a large, established operator with a finance team that enjoys net-30 terms and can absorb minimums without noticing. If your GGR is big and stable, the invoice is just another payable, and the credit period is genuinely useful cash flow.
Prepaid suits everyone else, and honestly it suits the big operators too once they do the math. Assume the same fee percentage either way. What changes is that you cannot be surprised by an invoice, you never pay a minimum in a weak month, and a new brand can start on $500 instead of a setup fee plus a deposit. The trade is that you fund the fee slightly earlier than you would on net-30 terms. For most operators we talk to, certainty beats 30 days of float.
What to do next
Take your last three months of GGR, or your realistic forecast if you are pre-launch. Multiply by 0.06. That number is your monthly fee under either model, so the model choice is really about cash-flow shape, not cost.
Then map the fee to top-up sizes: $500 covers about $8,333 GGR, $1,000 about $16,667, $1,500 about $25,000, $2,000 about $33,333. Pick the size that covers your expected month with a small buffer, and check whether your current arrangement’s minimums, setup fees or deposits are costing you more than the fee itself. For a lot of operators, that last check is the one that settles the argument.
