A license that once cost less than a second-hand laptop and took a few weeks to clear is the real reason so many operators built their entire growth strategy around the smallest possible deposit. Anyone scanning today’s roster of Curacao casinos is really looking at the surviving output of an era when getting licensed almost never slowed an operator down, and speed at the paperwork stage translated directly into speed at the cashier. That trade-off is easy to lose track of a year and a half after Curaçao dismantled the system that made it possible, since the deposit habit it produced never actually went away.
That speed advantage shows up most clearly at the deposit box. Because entry costs sat near zero for years, the deposit line became the one lever every new brand could pull to win a first-time player, and that is why a shopping trip through today’s Low-deposit casinos still turns up names that trace straight back to that cheap-license decade.
Why Did a Curaçao License Used to Cost Less Than a Used Car?
From 1996 through the early 2020s, only four private companies earned a Curaçao master license: Antillephone N.V., Curacao Interactive Licensing N.V., Curacao eGaming (through Cyberluck) and Gaming Curacao.
Each company resold its master license to others, earning sub-licenses, and competed with the others on price and speed to deliver review services for online gambling operators. By the early 2020s, hundreds of online gambling operators were licensed under each of these four companies, and each had to earn players’ trust in ways beyond its license alone. Thus, while these online casinos had no decade of player payouts to boast, they could at least offer players an account that could take real money, starting at a single dollar.
Weeks, Not Months, and a Bill Under $25,000
Sub-licensing packages often cost less than $25,000 all in, and the sportsbook or online casino project would be live in just a few weeks. For an operator planning to acquire players as cheaply as possible before worrying about license upgrades, licensing cost was the only real cost the company controlled.
If licensing cost less than a month’s worth of marketing costs, a deposit of $1 or $5 would not be a way of showing consideration for the operator – it would simply be the next variable that the company controlled.
What the 2024 Reform Actually Changed
That calculus flipped on 24 December 2024, when the Landsverordening op de Kansspelen (the National Ordinance on Games of Chance, known industry-wide as the LOK) came fully into force and handed all licensing power to a single government regulator, the Curaçao Gaming Authority.
The Netherlands drove the reform, tying the overhaul to pandemic-era financial support, and the resulting law dismantled a structure that had barely changed since the original 1993 ordinance. The four master license holders lost the right to issue anything new, every legacy sub-license expired at the start of 2025, and the temporary orange transitional seal that let operators keep trading while a new application was processed expired permanently on 15 October 2025. Anyone still citing an old sub-license today is not operating inside the current framework at all.
| Feature | Pre-2024 sub-license system | Direct CGA license (from December 2024) |
| Issuing body | Four private master license holders | Curaçao Gaming Authority, directly |
| Typical entry cost | Often under $25,000 | Roughly €47,000 to €61,000 a year |
| Approval time | A matter of weeks | Two review phases, about eight weeks each |
| Local presence | Not required | Local managing director and office required |
| Licence lifespan | Tied to the master licence’s own term | Indefinite, subject to ongoing compliance |
The Bill Nearly Tripled Overnight
One breakdown of the current fee structure puts the total annual cost of a direct B2C license at roughly €47,450, split between a treasury contribution and a supervisory fee, while other consultancies quote an annual figure closer to NAf 120,000 (about €61,700) for the license seal itself once every cost category is added up.
The exact total depends on which fees a given source counts, but the direction is consistent: a multiple of what the old sub-license packages cost, and that is before factoring in the newer requirement for a resident managing director and local staff, which is being phased in through April 2027. The staffing rule scales over time, starting with a single Curaçao-based key person and rising to three by the license’s fifth year, plus a resident managing director who is excluded from that headcount entirely.
Five Operators, One Shared Playbook
A check of the CGA’s public license register against the five brands named in the brief shows they all currently hold valid direct licenses, not leftover sub-licenses.
Melbet operates under licence OGL/2024/561/0554 through Pelican Entertainment B.V. 1xBet holds OGL/2024/1262/0493 through Caecus N.V. GG.Bet runs on OGL/2024/688/0234 through River Entertainment B.V. Martin Casino and Irwin Casino, meanwhile, are sister brands: both sit under the same licence, OGL/2024/169/0146, issued to GALAKTIKA N.V.
Players who tried online casino games for the first time on any of these five rarely checked which of the four old master license holders stood behind the site; they checked the number on the deposit box instead, and that habit still shows up on the current cashier pages:
- Melbet: minimum deposit as low as $1 through several payment routes.
- 1xBet: minimum deposit as low as €1, though the exact floor shifts by currency and payment method.
- GG.Bet: minimum deposit typically €3 to €10, depending on the payment route chosen.
- Martin Casino and Irwin Casino: minimum deposits generally sit between €5 and €20, with Irwin’s cashier advertising a €5 floor.
Martin and Irwin are worth a second look, because their shared license was issued on 28 October 2024, weeks before the LOK reform actually took effect. Even a brand launching right at the hinge point between the old system and the new one still chose to compete with a low deposit floor, which suggests the habit has outlived the cheap-compliance economics that originally created it. Before an operator builds any reputation of its own, the casino online experience has to do all the persuading, and a low deposit line is still the cheapest way to start that conversation.
What a Low Minimum Tells You, And What It No Longer Tells You
A $1 or $5 minimum used to be a reasonable, if indirect, signal that an operator could afford to take a chance on light-touch regulation because the regulation itself cost almost nothing.
That signal is gone. Direct CGA licensing now runs into five figures annually before a single dollar of marketing is spent, and mandatory local staffing raises the floor further for anyone starting today. What survives is closer to a marketing habit inherited from operators old enough to have built their acquisition funnel before the reform arrived, rather than proof of anything about current compliance costs.
That is the real legacy of the cheap-license years: it shaped how the online casino industry still markets itself to a first-time depositor, years after the licensing economics that made the habit affordable flipped completely. Even now, online casino slots remain the single most common reason a player opens an account with $1 or $5 already sitting in it, so the deposit line keeps doing marketing work long after it stopped reflecting how cheap it actually is to run the site behind it.
A genuine CGA license displays a clickable seal that resolves to the regulator’s own certificate system, not a static badge copied from another site, and that five-second check now tells a player more about an operator’s current standing than any deposit figure ever could.
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