White label sportsbooks
A white label sportsbook is a finished book rented under your own name. The provider supplies the platform and usually the license, the payments and the trading, and you supply the brand and the players. In return it keeps a share of what your players lose, and often a good deal more control than the word "your" suggests.
What you are renting
Think of it as a house with your name on the door. The provider's sportsbook software runs underneath (the odds feed, the risk tools, the wallet, the identity checks, the payment methods), and the site on top carries your logo, your colors and your web address. Players sign up with you, deposit with you as far as they can tell, and bet. The sportsbook software page goes through those parts one by one.
In many deals the provider also lends you its gambling license: the book operates under the provider's license, and you operate as its marketing partner. That is what makes a white label quick. Getting a license of your own takes time and money, and a white label skips it.
The step up is usually called turnkey: the same kind of platform, but under a license you hold yourself, with more control and more of the paperwork. The words are used loosely, so ask which one you are being sold.
What the provider keeps
The share is the obvious thing. Most white label deals take a percentage of gross gaming revenue, the money your players lost, often with a setup fee before launch and a monthly minimum after it. Read what the percentage is applied to. A share of gross revenue and a share of revenue after bonuses and payment fees are different sums, and the contract decides which you get.
The less obvious things are often worth more. The provider usually keeps the license, so the book stops being legal the day the deal ends. It may hold the players' money, collect the deposits and pay you your share after the month closes. It may run the trading, which means it sets the prices and decides whose limits get cut, and a player you spent money bringing in can be limited by someone you have never spoken to. And the player accounts may be its, not yours. I'd ask, before anything else, what I take with me if I leave. If the answer is a domain name and a logo, you were renting traffic for someone else.
None of this is sharp practice. The provider holds the license and carries the regulator, so it wants control of the money and the risk. Just know that you are buying a brand on someone else's book.
The arithmetic against a head fee
A pay-per-head shop charges a fixed fee for each active player, win or lose. A white label usually charges a share, so it costs more when you win and less when you lose. Here is how the two can compare, with made-up terms.
Say you have 50 active players a week who bet $20,000 between them, and you hold 5 percent, which is $1,000. At a $10 head, the per-head shop costs $500 whatever happens. At a 20 percent share, the white label takes $200 of the $1,000. In a week when your players win, the per-head bill is still $500 and the share is nothing, unless a minimum applies, and it often does.
That makes the white label look cheap, and it isn't the whole picture. The per-head agent knows his players and they bet on credit, so he spends nothing to find them. The white label operator is selling to the public, so marketing, bonuses and payment fees come out of his side, and the bonuses a public book has to offer to compete are not small.
When it beats pay per head
Pay per head is built for a bookie with players he knows, on credit, settled by hand. If that is your business, a white label adds costs you don't need. A white label starts to make sense when you want to take deposits from players you don't know, put a brand in front of them and spend money to market it. Different players, a different business.
When it beats building
Against building or licensing a platform of your own, a white label wins on time and on money up front. You can be open in a fraction of the time, and you aren't paying a development team or a license before you have a single player. It loses on control and on what you own at the end. I'd start on a white label to find out whether I could bring in players at a cost that left a profit, and I'd only move to turnkey or to my own platform once the share I was paying looked bigger than the cost of doing it myself.
Before you sign
These are the questions I'd want answered in writing:
- Whose license, and where may I take players from under it?
- Who holds player money, and when is my share paid?
- What exactly is the percentage applied to, and what is the minimum?
- Who sets my prices and my players' limits, and can I change them?
- What do I take with me if the deal ends, the player accounts included?
Where you may run a book, and where you may take players from, depends on where you and your players are. A provider's license covers the places it covers and nowhere else.
The white label gets you a book fast. Whether it is your book depends on the last question on that list.