What an iGaming Operator Can Actually Afford Per Depositor

Affordable CAC is the most you can pay to acquire a depositing player and still make money on that player over their lifetime. It is a ceiling, not a target. Spend under it and the player pays for themselves; spend over it and you are buying revenue at a loss and hoping retention rescues it.

Two terms carry the whole calculation. iGaming player LTV — player lifetime value — is the gross profit a depositor returns over the whole time they play with you: monthly revenue per player × months retained × gross margin. Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is everything you spent to get that depositor, divided by the number of depositors you got. The relationship between the two is the single number that decides whether an acquisition channel is sustainable, and it is the only reason a cost per depositor can be called cheap or expensive at all.

This matters most at the point of deciding a budget, which is why it is a mid-funnel question rather than an awareness one. Before you brief a campaign — creator, affiliate or otherwise — the ceiling tells you what a "good" cost per depositor even is for your business. It is the same discipline that sits underneath how an iGaming marketing budget gets split, one level down: not how much you spend in total, but what each depositor may cost.

No public iGaming operator discloses its cost per acquired player. Read the quarterly filings of DraftKings, Rush Street Interactive, or BetMGM's parent companies and you will find revenue per user, active-user counts, marketing spend in total, and contribution — but never a clean "we paid $X to acquire a depositor." Marketing is reported as one line, not divided by the players it bought.

That absence is the reason a page like this has to exist, and it is worth stating plainly rather than filling with a plausible-sounding figure. Anyone who quotes you a single industry "cost per FTD" is either citing an affiliate's price, not an operator's blended cost, or inventing it. What operators do give you is the raw material to compute the ceiling yourself, and what the affiliate market gives you is a going rate to check that ceiling against. The rest of this guide uses both.

The disclosed inputs are revenue-per-user and contribution, and they are enough to size a player's value. These are the figures public operators actually put in their 2025 and 2026 results.

Two cautions on reading these, because the labels are not interchangeable. DraftKings' ARPMUP is revenue per paying customer — the closest public proxy for what a depositor is worth per month. Rush Street's ARPMAU is revenue per active user, a broader base that includes players who did not pay in the period, so it is not directly comparable to ARPMUP. Both are useful; mixing them silently is how bad benchmarks get made.

BetMGM's FY2025 contribution of $607m, up from $118m on net revenue of $2.8bn, is the same story at portfolio scale: what a book of players is worth after the marketing that bought them, without ever splitting that marketing per player.

For scale on why this is worth getting right: US iGaming revenue reached $10.74 billion in 2025, up 27.6%, and sports betting $16.96 billion, up 22.8%, on handle of $166.94 billion. In Great Britain, remote casino gross yield was £1.5 billion in the October–December 2025 quarter, about 70% of all remote gross gambling yield. The players those numbers represent are the ones your CAC ceiling is about.

The standard target across iGaming is an LTV-to-CAC ratio of at least 3:1. A player should return at least three times what you paid to acquire them, once you count lifetime gross profit against total acquisition cost. It is the same 3:1 rule used across subscription businesses, and Track360's affiliate-marketing glossary calls LTV:CAC the single most important metric for judging whether an affiliate programme generates sustainable returns — the same test applies to any acquisition channel.

The ceiling is simply the inverse of the ratio. If LTV must be at least three times CAC, then CAC must be at most one-third — about 33% — of LTV. That is the number to hold in your head: whatever a player is worth in lifetime gross profit, you can afford to spend up to a third of it acquiring them and still hit a 3:1 return. A stricter operator runs 4:1 (a 25% ceiling); a growth-stage one might tolerate 2:1 (a 50% ceiling) for a while. The ratio you choose sets the ceiling directly.

The formula is four inputs, and every one of them is something you either disclose or can estimate. Lifetime value is average monthly revenue per player, times expected retention in months, times gross margin. The ceiling is that LTV divided by your target ratio.

Worked example — every figure labelled disclosed or assumed. Take DraftKings' disclosed ARPMUP of $139 a month as the monthly revenue per paying player. Assume a 12-month retention and a 50% gross margin — both assumptions, not disclosed, and both are yours to replace. Lifetime gross revenue is 139 × 12 = $1,668. Applying the 50% margin gives an LTV of $834. Dividing by a 3:1 target gives a maximum affordable CAC of $278 per depositor. Change the assumptions and the ceiling moves: at 9 months and a 45% margin, the same $139 ARPMUP yields an LTV of $563 and a ceiling of $188.

Every number in that example is Lumina Clippers' own arithmetic on a disclosed input ($139 ARPMUP) and two clearly labelled assumptions (retention, margin). The $139 is published by DraftKings; the $278 is not a published statistic and must never be presented as one.

That single figure — your maximum affordable CAC — is what every acquisition channel gets judged against, whether it is an affiliate deal, a paid placement where one is permitted, or a clipping marketing strategy built on creator-led short-form. Set it in the calculator below with your own numbers, then keep it beside you for the rest of this page.

Once you have a ceiling, the affiliate market tells you whether it clears the going rate. Affiliates are the one part of the chain that publishes prices, so their rates are the reference point operators actually use.

The benchmark to cite is Track360's Affiliate Commission Rates Benchmark 2026: Tier-1 casino CPA of $150–400 per first-time depositor, with a median deal at $250, and revenue-share deals at 25–45% of net gaming revenue. Put that beside the worked ceiling above — a $278 maximum CAC against a $250 median CPA — and the deal clears, but only just, with about $28 of headroom. Tighten your assumptions and the same median CPA breaches the ceiling. That headroom, not the absolute cost, is what a comparison like clipping versus affiliate CPA is really arguing about.

Affiliate results also show how the channel is priced in volume terms rather than per-player cost — depositors delivered, and a clear lean toward revenue share over fixed CPA.

Better Collective's 308,000 new depositing customers, 77% of them on revenue-share contracts, came on quarterly revenue of €86.3 million; Gambling.com Group's 98,000 new depositing customers in Q4 2025 sat inside full-year revenue of $165.4 million, up 30%. Note the last row of that table: the affiliate side of the market publishes its prices and its volumes, and the operator side still publishes no blended cost per acquired player. Your ceiling is the only number that closes the gap.

The single biggest lever on your CAC ceiling is where the player is, because revenue per user varies by an order of magnitude across markets. Rush Street disclosed ARPMAU of $331 in the US and Canada against $32 in Latin America for Q4 2025 — the same company, the same quarter, a tenfold gap.

A campaign that comfortably clears its ceiling acquiring US players at $200 would blow through it acquiring Latin-American players at the very same cost. Before optimising a creative or negotiating a rate, the market you are acquiring in has already set most of your ceiling. Both ceilings above are Lumina Clippers' arithmetic on Rush Street's two disclosed ARPMAU figures and the same stated 12-month, 50%-margin assumptions — neither is a figure Rush Street published.

The disclosed data does not segment player value by how the player was acquired. No public operator breaks out whether a player who arrived through an affiliate, an ad, or a creator clip goes on to be worth more or less over their lifetime. So this guide does not claim that clip-sourced players retain better — or worse — than affiliate-sourced players. There is no public data to support a claim in either direction, and inventing one would be exactly the kind of unsourced figure this analysis exists to avoid.

What the ceiling does do is give every channel the same test. A depositor is worth the same to your P&L however they arrived; the question for each channel is only whether it delivers depositors under your ceiling. That is the honest way to weigh whether clipping works for brands against any other channel — on cost per depositor against a ceiling you set, not on a retention claim nobody can source. It also raises the harder operational question of how you attribute a deposit to a clip when there is no link to click.

This is the static mirror of the calculator above — the same four steps, on the same worked inputs, so the arithmetic survives with JavaScript off and can be checked line by line.

What the verdict means. If the CPA you are quoted is below your ceiling, the price is one your ceiling carries at your target ratio; if it is above, either the ratio, the retention, the margin or the market has to change before the spend makes sense. The one disclosed input in the worked column is DraftKings' $139 ARPMUP; the $278 ceiling is Lumina Clippers' arithmetic on that input plus two labelled assumptions, not a published figure.

Clearing the ceiling is a necessary test, not a sufficient one — a channel still has to actually deliver depositors at the price it quotes, which is why how clipping campaigns are priced and what they deliver have to be read together.

Running this before you brief, rather than after the spend, is the difference between a channel decision and a hope. It is the first thing we set on a casino and iGaming clipping campaign — your revenue per player, your retention, your margin, your ratio — because a cost per depositor means nothing until there is a ceiling to measure it against.

· DraftKings Inc., Q4 2025 results (12 February 2026) — ARPMUP $139; 4.8 million monthly unique payers; Q4 revenue up 43%.

· Rush Street Interactive, Q4 and full-year 2025 results — ARPMAU $331 in the US and Canada, $32 in Latin America.

· BetMGM, FY2025 business update (4 February 2026) — contribution $607m (2024: $118m); net revenue $2.8bn, up 33%.

· American Gaming Association, commercial gaming revenue 2025 — iGaming $10.74bn (+27.6%); sports betting $16.96bn (+22.8%) on $166.94bn of handle.

· UK Gambling Commission, industry statistics to December 2025 — remote casino GGY £1.5bn, about 70% of remote gross gambling yield (Oct–Dec 2025).

· Track360, Affiliate Commission Rates Benchmark 2026 — Tier-1 casino CPA $150–400 with a $250 median deal; revenue share 25–45% of NGR. Also LTV-to-CAC ratio glossary and iGaming player lifetime value and affiliate commissions.

· Better Collective, Q1 2026 report — 308,000 new depositing customers, 77% on revenue share; revenue €86.3m.

· Gambling.com Group, Q4 and full-year 2025 results — 98,000 new depositing customers in Q4 2025; full-year revenue $165.4m, up 30%.