How much does an RGS cost in 2026?

Renting a hosted Remote Gaming Server (RGS) costs roughly EUR 500 to EUR 3,000 per month plus transaction fees, depending on plan and scale. Building an RGS in-house typically costs several hundred thousand euros and 12 or more months of development before the first certified game can go live. A third option is buying the source code of an existing platform outright, which hizi.io offers at EUR 250,000 one time.

Most RGS vendors do not publish prices; deals are negotiated behind NDAs, so public reference points are rare. hizi.io publishes its full price list, which makes it a useful baseline for what hosted RGS capacity costs in 2026. All figures on this page are the actual published prices as of August 2026.

Renting a hosted RGS: monthly pricing

Two cost drivers matter beyond the base fee. First, transaction volume: every spin generates transactions, so a game portfolio doing 10 million transactions a month adds EUR 1,000 to 1,200 to the bill depending on plan. Second, what is bundled: on some platforms, operator integrations, aggregation, and compliance tooling are priced separately or gated behind bespoke work. On hizi.io they are part of the plan, and every operator integration is built by hizi free of charge, which removes the per-integration costs that otherwise accumulate as a studio grows its distribution.

There is no setup fee, no long-term contract, and no procurement cycle: plans run month to month under online T&Cs, and a live sandbox RGS is available about 3 minutes after signup. The full feature and limit breakdown per plan is on the pricing page.

Fixed fee vs aggregator revenue share: the cost at scale

Most studios reach operators through an aggregator, and most aggregators charge a revenue share: typically around 20% of the studio's income for as long as the games run. Rev-share feels cheap on day one because it starts at zero. The question is what it costs once games succeed. Since every operator integration on hizi is built free of charge, hizi's entry production plan can be compared directly with the aggregator model.

To compare them, translate both into the same units. Assuming an average stake of EUR 0.50 and an average RTP of 95%, one million transactions represent EUR 500,000 in turnover and EUR 25,000 in GGR. A studio earning a typical 7.5% rev-share on that GGR invoices EUR 1,875. An aggregator taking 20% of that income charges EUR 375 per million transactions. hizi.basic charges EUR 120 for the same million transactions, a variable cost more than 3 times lower; what the aggregator model saves you is only the fixed monthly fee.

Assumptions: EUR 0.50 average stake, 95% average RTP, one transaction per game round, studio rev-share of 7.5% of GGR, aggregator fee of 20% of rev-share income. hizi.basic plan.

The two models also differ in what they bind you to. An aggregator rev-share runs for as long as the games run, and the percentage never shrinks. hizi is priced the way any rented service is priced: a base fee plus usage, month to month under online T&Cs, with no lock-in and no exclusivity; your games can run wherever you want them to. The mathematical consequence of a base fee is that below roughly EUR 147,000 in monthly GGR across your games (about EUR 11,000 in monthly rev-share income), the aggregator's 20% is still the smaller number. But look at where that break-even sits. EUR 147,000 in monthly GGR is roughly what a single well-performing game reaches with one good operator; a studio arrives at the threshold the moment its first game works. And the same threshold is where a 20% fee stops being a rounding error and becomes a real line on the cost side: EUR 2,200 a month and climbing with every new game and every new operator. In other words, the studios for whom rev-share is the smaller number are the ones not yet earning. Every studio with real traction is already past the point where usage-based pricing wins, and past the break-even the two curves never meet again:

Put differently: an aggregator takes 20% of your income forever, by definition. hizi's share of your income shrinks as you grow: about 10% at EUR 500,000 monthly GGR and 8% at EUR 1,000,000, trending further down from there. (From about EUR 1.9 million in monthly GGR, hizi.standard's lower transaction fee of EUR 100 per million makes it the cheaper plan and pushes the share down further.) Revenue share taxes success; a fixed fee plus per-transaction pricing rewards it. The break-even is therefore less a caveat than a milestone: it marks the month your first successful game starts paying for the switch.

Building an RGS in-house

Building your own RGS means developing the game engine, certified RNG, wallet layer, transaction logging, backoffice, and operator connectivity from scratch, then taking the whole platform through laboratory certification before the first game can earn money. Based on two decades of shipping real money games, a realistic budget is several hundred thousand euros and 12 or more months before go-live. The money goes into four buckets:

• Engineering. A platform team covering backend, math, wallet integration, and tooling for a year or more. This is the largest single cost, and it does not end at launch: the platform needs permanent maintenance.
• Certification. The platform and RNG must be certified by accredited testing laboratories, and each game is then certified per market. Certification costs recur every time a market's requirements change.
• Hosting and operations. Regulated markets impose requirements on where and how the platform runs, including audit trails and reporting. This means real infrastructure and DevOps cost, not a hobby server.
• Integrations. Every operator and aggregator connection is its own integration project. Building and maintaining these in-house is a permanent engineering tax that grows with distribution.

The comparison to renting is stark on time as much as money: 12+ months of build against days to production on a hosted platform. For most new studios the in-house route only makes sense if platform ownership is itself the business goal. The full decision framework, including the cases where building wins, is in Should you build or rent an RGS?.

The third path: buying the source code

Between renting forever and building from zero sits a third option: buy the source code of a proven platform. hizi.io offers a one-time source-code licence at EUR 250,000. Studios can start on a rented plan, launch and earn revenue within days, and move to full sovereignty later once the economics justify it, without ever rebuilding or migrating their games. Compared to an in-house build, this buys a platform that is already certified and battle-tested, at a price point below what the build would cost, with zero platform development time.

What this means in practice

As of August 2026, a new studio can run the numbers concretely: a first year on hizi.basic costs EUR 18,000 plus transaction fees, against several hundred thousand euros and a year of building before any revenue in-house. Renting first and keeping the source-code option open defers the sovereignty decision until there is real revenue to base it on. To understand what the platform you would be renting actually consists of, start with What is a Remote Gaming Server (RGS)?.