Why Kikit exists
Kikit was set up by two editors who had watched the affiliate industry drift away from anything resembling actual testing. Rankings were sorted by whichever operator paid the most that quarter, screenshots came straight from press kits, and glowing "verified" payouts were signed off by people who had never opened an account. We wanted to run a review desk more like a consumer magazine runs a product test. The rule we drew a line under from day one: if no editor on our team has staked their own money at an operator and cashed the winnings out again, that operator does not appear in a Kikit list. Nothing has ever changed that.
Being part of the H88 publisher network means we can pull on shared payout benchmarks, complaint feeds and licence-tracking that the network aggregates across dozens of sister sites. That layer of data sits beneath every score you see on Kikit, alongside the individual test log the reviewer keeps in their own name. We cover only operators licensed to serve players in the nine countries listed above, and where a market runs a national self-exclusion register or affordability regime we will not push readers toward grey-market alternatives that would sidestep it.
Our six-point review framework
Every operator that makes it into a Kikit ranking has been put through the same six-part audit. We run the framework identically in every market so that a four-star score in Portugal means the same thing as a four-star score in Sweden or the UK. Local specifics such as the regulator, the cashier options and the shape of the bonus shift country by country. The scoring method behind them does not.
| Check | How we test it | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Licence | Checked against the regulator's live public register (UKGC, MGA, Spelinspektionen, KSA, Spillemyndigheden, ANJ, SRIJ, ACMA), never taken from a badge in the footer. | The regulator is the only party a player can actually escalate to if a dispute stalls. |
| 2. Real deposit | A reviewer funds a live account with their own money, using a payment method a first-time local player would realistically reach for. | Shows where the actual onboarding flow drifts from the polished promise on the landing page. |
| 3. Game library | At least five hours spread across three slot volatility bands, one live-dealer round and one RNG table game, scored on depth and studio spread. | Range and consistency decide whether a signup becomes a casino you actually come back to. |
| 4. Bonus terms | Wagering multiple, maximum bet, game weighting, win caps and expiry windows are read line by line before an offer is ever claimed. | Separates promotions that give players a fair shot from balance traps built to lock funds up. |
| 5. Cash-out timing | A genuine withdrawal is timed from the moment the request is submitted to the moment the money lands in the receiving account. | Tells readers when a win turns into money they can actually spend, not when it clears "processing". |
| 6. Support test | Live chat and email each handle a straightforward onboarding query, a fiddly bonus question and a deliberately awkward dispute scenario. | Reveals the kind of help a player can actually count on the day something goes wrong. |
Each check gets logged as a pass, a partial or a fail. Partials feed into the final score and are called out in the body of the review itself. A hard fail on either the licence check or the cash-out check pulls an operator from the list on its own, no matter how strongly it scored elsewhere.
Why a Kikit score can move between visits
A Kikit score is a snapshot, never a monument. Bonus terms get rewritten, cashier options come and go, KYC thresholds tighten, brands change hands and support teams turn over. The moment our monitoring picks up a real change, a payout that quietly doubles in length, a wagering multiple that jumps overnight, a licence that slips into under-review status, the score updates and the page carries a fresh retest date. A four-star operator can drop to three, or vanish from the ranking altogether, inside a single review cycle. That is by design.
Editorial standards and how we are funded
To be plain about it: affiliate commission pays for Kikit. When a reader clicks through to a casino from one of our tables and signs up, the operator may pay us a referral fee at no cost to the reader. That revenue is what keeps every guide on the site free to read, with no paywall, no email gate and no premium tier hiding the good bits.
The one thing commission has never bought is a position in a ranking. The commercial rate we agree with an operator is identical whether we place them first, tenth or leave them off the list entirely. It gets signed once and stays fixed regardless of where they end up. Plenty of casinos on our tables pay us nothing at all, either because they run a closed in-house programme we have not joined or because we have chosen to stay off the network that represents them, and they sit exactly where the test data put them.
Our editorial policy also rules out sponsored placements, ghost-written verdicts and AI-generated reviews. Every ranking carries a named editor, every payout test is logged with a timestamp, and the commercial arrangement is flagged at the top of every page that carries outbound links. The full breakdown lives on our affiliate disclosure page.
The people behind the reviews
Hannah Sullivan
Samuel Turner
The desk is led by Hannah Sullivan, Senior Editor, who brings almost ten years of iGaming experience to the role. She started as a payments analyst at a Malta-based operator, worked her way through operations and compliance, and has spent the last four years reporting on the industry as an independent editor. Every payout test and every score on the site passes across her desk before it is published.
Alongside Hannah, casino reviewer Samuel Turner takes on the Nordics and the rest of Europe and leads the bonus-terms audits, while Hannah herself handles the English-speaking sites across the UK, Ireland and Australia. Together they run the deposits, log the play and time the withdrawals, and each is credited on the work they produce. We publish nothing anonymously, we turn away sponsored posts, and we never let AI write our verdicts. If there is a byline on a page, a real person wrote it, funded the deposit and timed the cash-out.
Get in touch with the desk
Spotted a bonus figure that no longer matches what the operator is advertising, or want to push back on a score we have given? Head to the contact page for the editorial address, hello@kikit.io. A real editor reads every message, and we try to reply inside two working days.