A comparison site that says what it does not know
Every casino comparison site claims independence. The useful question is what a site refuses to do when refusing costs it money — so that is what this page is about.
What this is
ProvenPayouts is an independent comparison publisher covering crypto and licensed online casinos. It is not an operator: it takes no bets, holds no gambling licence, and has no financial interest in whether you win or lose. It exists because the material facts that decide whether a casino is worth your money — the base a wagering requirement applies to, whether a maximum-cashout clause makes a large win unpayable, whether the licence claim survives a check against the regulator's register — are all published, all checkable, and almost never surfaced by the sites that rank these operators.
What we actually do
We read the terms and the public record. Licence claims are checked against the regulator's own register rather than the badge in the footer. Bonus terms are quoted from the operator's own pages — and because these operators refuse connections from our network, usually from dated Internet Archive captures, which are the stronger citation anyway since a casino can rewrite its terms silently while a live link still resolves. Complaint records from independent mediation services are read for patterns rather than counted, because a large operator will always show more disputes in absolute terms than a small one. Everything then goes through a published weighting, documented at how we rank.
What we do not do, and will not start doing
We do not test withdrawals. We do not deposit money, do not time our own cashouts, and publish no test logs — and where the category's convention is to imply otherwise, we say so explicitly on the page instead. There is no aggregate rating anywhere on this site, because we have not collected one. There are no named reviewers with stock photographs and invented credentials; the byline is the organisation. Where we could not establish something, we publish the gap rather than filling it — there are 164 such open items across the operator reviews, listed with the reason each one is open.
How the money works
We may earn a commission when a reader signs up through one of our links. That is the whole business model and it is disclosed above the fold on every page rather than in a footer. It never changes a score or an ordering. Operators whose affiliate terms would compromise that — clauses requiring positive representation, or exclusivity — are listed for readers and carry no sign-up link at all, which costs us money on every one of them. Outbound links are geo-enforced server-side and fail closed: no affiliate link is emitted to a reader in a market where that operator is not permitted, even when the commercial incentive points the other way.
Why an unmonetised operator stays in the ranking
Because removing it would make the ranking a list of who pays us, and every reader would be right to assume exactly that. If an operator belongs in the top ten on the published criteria it appears in the top ten, with a note explaining that it carries no link and why. The alternative — quietly dropping it — is the single most common way comparison sites mislead without ever writing a false sentence.
Where we might be wrong
Our scores are editorial judgements, not measurements, and reasonable people can disagree with the weighting — which is why the weighting is published rather than described. Archived terms carry a snapshot date and may have been revised since. Complaint records reflect players motivated enough to file, which is not a representative sample. None of that makes the assessments useless, but it does mean corrections are welcome and acted on: write to info@provenpayouts.com and we will fix the page and update its checked date.
At a 4% house edge a casino bonus breaks even at 25× wagering when the multiplier applies to the bonus alone, and 12.5× when it applies to deposit + bonus. The market standard offer is 35× to 45×. Of the six operators whose own published terms give both figures, all six price above their own break-even. That table is published in full, with the formulas and the sources, under CC BY 4.0 — take it and check it.
18+ only. Gambling involves risk and is not a source of income. ProvenPayouts publishes comparison and reference material; it is not financial advice and not a betting strategy.