How a Casino Bonus Is Built, and What It Actually Costs

A bonus is a priced product and the price is turnover. Using Erabet’s published terms as a worked example: 500 CAD at 35× means 17,500 CAD of play and roughly 700 CAD of expected cost.

Published: February 13, 2026 • By Victor Almeida

A casino bonus is a priced product, not a present. The price is paid in turnover — the amount that has to pass through the games before the credit becomes a withdrawable balance. Reading an offer means setting the headline percentage aside and pricing the clauses underneath it, because that is where the cost lives.

The worked example below is Erabet’s own promotion sheet, read on 23 September 2026. Those figures are the operator’s publication rather than an independent measurement, and promotions change without notice. Everything done with them here is arithmetic any reader can repeat.

The levers that set the price

Strip the styling off almost any welcome offer and the same eight parameters appear. They are the product.

• Match percentage and cap — how much credit a deposit buys, and where it stops growing.
• Wagering multiplier — how many times that credit must be staked.
• Wagering base — the bonus alone, or bonus plus deposit.
• Validity window — how many days there are to do it in.
• Game weighting — what each game contributes: slots usually 100 per cent, table games 10 per cent or nothing.
• Maximum stake during wagering — the ceiling on each round until the requirement is met.
• Cap on bonus winnings — the most that can be withdrawn from bonus play.
• Free spin stake and life — the fixed value of each spin, how many arrive per day, how their winnings are treated.

Against those lines, here is what the operator publishes.

Three of the eight levers are missing from that page: game weighting, the maximum stake permitted while wagering, and any cap on winnings from bonus play. Their absence is not a guarantee that the rules do not exist — they normally sit in the general terms — and an offer cannot be priced until they are found.

The first calculation is turnover

Turnover is the credit multiplied by the multiplier. For the headline offer that is 500 CAD × 35 = 17,500 CAD of stakes before anything can be withdrawn.

The house edge of a mainstream slot is 100 per cent minus its return to player; on a 96 per cent game that is 4 per cent. Four per cent of 17,500 CAD is 700 CAD — more than the credit being cleared. Played to completion on an ordinary slot the offer carries a negative expected value before the first spin, not because anything is hidden, but because 35 and 4 per cent multiply out that way.

The base moves the bill as much as the multiplier does. The sheet applies 35× to the bonus. Where an operator applies the same multiplier to bonus plus deposit, a 500 CAD deposit matched by 500 CAD of credit produces 35,000 CAD of required turnover and roughly 1,400 CAD of expected cost. Identical headline, double the price.

The clock is a lever, not a formality

Fourteen days for 17,500 CAD is 1,250 CAD of stakes every day, for two weeks without a gap. At one CAD a spin that is 1,250 spins a day. Most accounts never get there, and an unfinished requirement costs the operator nothing — which is why short windows travel with large multipliers.

The smaller offers are not automatically gentler. Midweek Booster: 200 CAD × 35 = 7,000 CAD over seven days, or 1,000 CAD a day. Weekend Reload: 300 CAD × 35 = 10,500 CAD over seven days, or 1,500 CAD a day — a heavier daily load than the welcome bonus, on a third of the credit.

Weighting and the maximum stake

Weighting converts one number into a much bigger one. If slots count at 100 per cent and table games at 10 per cent, the same 17,500 CAD requirement becomes 175,000 CAD of blackjack or roulette. Why low-edge games are excluded or discounted is no mystery: at a blackjack edge of about 0.5 per cent, 17,500 CAD of turnover would cost roughly 88 CAD instead of 700 CAD. Weighting exists to stop turnover being bought cheaply.

Slots carry full weight because they are the games engineered to sustain a high decision rate, which is the subject of how slot interfaces are designed. The maximum stake rule works in the other direction: it caps how fast a requirement can be cleared and, more importantly, breaching it usually voids the bonus and everything won with it. That single clause is the most common reason a cleared bonus is not paid out.

A hundred free spins is ten CAD of play

Free spins are played at a fixed stake, and the stake is the whole story. One hundred spins at 0.10 CAD is 10 CAD of action, not 100 CAD of value. On a 96 per cent game, 10 CAD of action returns about 9.60 CAD on average. A hundred spins at 0.50 CAD would be five times the product under the same headline number, which is why spin value, not spin count, is the figure to look for — and the one most often left out.

Then the winnings carry their own multiplier. If 100 spins return 12 CAD and those winnings are subject to 35×, the requirement is 420 CAD of turnover, whose expected cost at 4 per cent is 16.80 CAD — more than the winnings being cleared.

Cashback is the cheapest line on the page

The weekly cashback carries 1×. That single digit is worth more than any percentage on the sheet. One hundred CAD of cashback at 1× has to be staked once: expected cost 4 CAD, leaving about 96 CAD. The same 100 CAD released at 35× requires 3,500 CAD of turnover, whose expected cost at 4 per cent is 140 CAD — more than the credit is worth, so in practice the balance is gone before the requirement is met. Only on a game with an edge near 1 per cent would 3,500 CAD of turnover cost about 35 CAD and leave something like 63 CAD of the nominal 100 — and those low-edge games are exactly the ones bonus terms exclude or weight at 10 per cent. Per CAD of face value: about 96 cents at 1×, at best around 63 at 35×, and realistically nothing on the games that actually count.

Cashback has its own catch: it is a rebate of 5 to 15 per cent on net weekly losses. A 15 per cent rebate on a 1,000 CAD net loss returns 150 CAD, and the week still closes 850 CAD down. The best-priced item on the page is still a discount on losing.

When the banner and the terms disagree

On the same site, on the same day, the banner advertises 200% up to C$1,000 while the terms table describes 100% up to 500 CAD. Both cannot be live. The larger headline would also be the larger bill: 1,000 CAD of credit at 35× is 35,000 CAD of turnover and roughly 1,400 CAD of expected cost. A bigger match is more play, not more money.

Whichever version is current, a promotions page that contradicts its own banner is a reason to read the general terms before depositing and to keep a screenshot of the offer being accepted. What is advertised, and where the two versions diverge, is tracked on the promo codes page; the offer-by-offer breakdown sits under bonuses. The payment rail makes no difference to any of this — a deposit settled in minutes on a blockchain carries exactly the same 35× as one settled by card, which is worth keeping in mind alongside what crypto genuinely changes at a casino.

Pricing any offer in two minutes

1. Multiply credit by multiplier. That number, not the percentage, is the offer.
2. Check the base: bonus only, or bonus plus deposit.
3. Multiply turnover by the edge of the games that count — 4 per cent on a 96 per cent slot.
4. Divide turnover by the days allowed, and ask whether that is a session anyone would play anyway.
5. Find the weighting table, the maximum stake and the win cap. If they are not published, assume they exist.
6. Read the free spin stake, never the spin count.
7. Compare everything against the lowest multiplier on the page. It is usually the cashback.

None of this makes a bonus unusable; it makes it measurable. A 35× credit buys extra time on the same bankroll, and on that basis it can be worth taking. What the published numbers do not support is treating it as a way to finish the week ahead. Read the multiplier, the base and the clock first, and the headline percentage last.