About TheBingoOnline — Who We Are and How We Work
Independent bingo coverage published by Aameya Digital Media since 2011. Who writes here, which markets we cover, where our licensing rule applies absolutely and where it cannot, and a plain account of how the commission works.
TheBingoOnline.com has been reviewing bingo sites since 2011 and is operated by Aameya Digital Media. No operator pays us to write a review, or to change one — a rating is never for sale — and we open a real account and deposit our own money at every site we cover.
What follows is who we are, the markets we work in, the people who write here, and how the money works. Our editorial guidelines handle the checking side.
TheBingoOnline at a Glance
- Publisher
- Aameya Digital Media
- Reviewing since
- 2011
- Markets
- UK, Ireland, Canada, New Zealand, United States
- Who writes here
- Three named writers, every page bylined
- How we test
- Real account, own money, withdrawal attempted
- How we are funded
- Affiliate commission — readers pay nothing
Last reviewed: August 2026.
What We Do
We test bingo sites and write up what we found, including the parts an operator would rather we left out. Every review starts with a real account and a real deposit, and ends with us trying to take the money back out again. We read the bonus terms in full, check the licence against the regulator’s register, and look at whether the promotions are worth the effort or just look like they are.
We get in touch with customer support when something needs clarifying — an ambiguous term, a withdrawal that has not arrived — rather than as a box-ticking step on every review, and we say what came back.
Bingo is the main thing, but most bingo sites now run slots and casino games alongside the rooms, and some casino brands have better bingo than the bingo brands do. So we cover both, because a reader deciding where to play needs to know what is actually on the site.
Which Markets We Cover, and What That Means
Our roots are in UK bingo and that is still most of what we do. Ireland, Canada, New Zealand and the United States are the others. What a licence gets you varies enormously between them, and most sites gloss over that.
| Market | Status | What that means |
|---|---|---|
| Great Britain | Licensed | Gambling Commission licence, checked on the public register. |
| Ireland | Licensed | Operators answer to a regulator that can act against them. |
| Ontario | Licensed | Competing operators licensed since 2022. |
| Alberta | Licensed | Opened to competing operators in July 2026. |
| Rest of Canada | Provincial only | The provincial operator's own site is the only licensed route. |
| New Zealand | Mid-change | A regime exists on paper. Nobody is licensed under it yet. |
| Seven US states | Licensed | NJ, DE, PA, MI, CT, WV and RI regulate online casino. |
| The rest of the US | Offshore | Licensed elsewhere, with no state regulator behind it. |
Regulated markets
In Great Britain, Ireland and Ontario, operators hold a licence and answer to a regulator that can act against them. So the rule here is simple. We only cover sites holding a current licence for the market they serve. And we look that licence up on the regulator’s public register, because a badge in a footer proves nothing and plenty of them are copied.
The US has seven states running regulated online casino at the moment: New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Connecticut, West Virginia and Rhode Island. Maine legalised it in January 2026 and has yet to open a single site. Nevada's version covers poker and nothing more.
Two markets mid-change
Canada is not one market. Two provinces have opened up to competing operators: Ontario in 2022, Alberta in July 2026 under the Alberta Gaming, Liquor and Cannabis Commission. Our rule above applies in full in both. Everywhere else the licensed route is the provincial operator's own site, which is why Canadians who want a wider choice of bingo tend to end up offshore. Our Canadian bingo coverage says which sites sit where.
New Zealand is mid-change. A licensing regime came into force in 2026, no operator has been licensed under it yet, and every online option open to a New Zealander today is still offshore — so that is how we treat them. Our New Zealand page follows it.
The offshore market, and why we cover it
Outside those seven states, an American who wants to play bingo online is looking at operators licensed somewhere else entirely — most often Curaçao, sometimes Kahnawake or Panama. There is no state regulator behind them, no state exclusion scheme covering them, and no ombudsman to complain to.
We cover those sites anyway. Two reasons. It is where the games are for most of the US audience, and a reader is better served by knowing which of those operators paid out when we tested them than by being told the whole category does not exist. Pretending otherwise would make this site tidier and less useful.
What we do instead is say so plainly. Where a site is offshore we mark it as offshore, we set out which protections do not apply, and we name the operators we would not go near — the closed ones, the clone domains, the ones whose withdrawal terms make the money hard to get back. Our guide to US online bingo legality covers how far regulation reaches state by state.
So the honest version of our licensing rule is this. In the regulated markets we hold to it absolutely. Offshore there is no local licence to require, so the rule has nothing to bite on — and we chose to cover that market anyway. Rather than let the standard quietly lapse, we tell you which market you are in and what you are giving up by being there.
Why We Started This Site
The bingo industry has always had two kinds of operator in it. There are the ones that pay out, answer when something goes wrong, and write their bonus terms in something close to English. And there are the ones that launch six near-identical sites on the same software, run them until the complaints pile up, and open six more.
Telling them apart is difficult from the outside, and the search results are not much help, because a great deal of what ranks reads as though nobody involved ever opened an account. We started this site to close that gap. The measure we hold ourselves to is not size — it is whether a page would still be useful if a family member read it before depositing.
Who Writes Here
Three people write and edit this site. Every page carries the name of whoever wrote it, and where a page has been through a later pass, the name of whoever updated it.
Elisha FranklinSenior Gaming & Promotions Writer
Elisha has written more of this site than anyone else, by a wide margin, and has been reviewing bingo and promotions for over sixteen years. Her beat is the part of a site you actually spend your evening in: the rooms, the ticket prices, the chat hosts, the weekly offers that come and go. She is the default byline when a new operator launches in the UK and someone has to open an account, claim the welcome offer, and find out whether it survives contact with the terms.
She also leads on major rewrites, which on this site means the uncomfortable ones — the pages where the original verdict has stopped being true and has to be replaced rather than patched. Her writing is conversational and aimed squarely at the player rather than the industry, which is a deliberate choice: most bingo coverage is written as though the reader already knows what a wagering requirement is.
Joy ThompsonSenior iGaming Content Writer
Joy has fifteen years in iGaming and handles the parts of a review that need reading rather than playing. Licensing, payment methods, withdrawal terms, and the comparisons between sites that share a platform and differ only in the skin — that is her beat, and it is the work that most often changes a verdict.
She takes the established operators and the big software networks, where the interesting question is rarely whether a site is legitimate and almost always what the small print does to the offer. Her approach is research-led and deliberately unexcited. When she writes that a site’s payout terms are fine, it is because she has read them, and when she writes that they are not, she points to the term the verdict rests on.
Sara PowellLead Bonuses & Promotions Editor
Sara has nine years in the industry and owns the two things this site is most often judged on: whether a bonus is worth claiming, and whether the pages are still true.
The first is analysis — taking an offer that reads as generous and working out what the wagering multiple, the game weighting and the expiry window actually leave you with. The second is the monthly freshness pass, which is less glamorous and matters more. Bonus terms change without notice, sites close, and a page that was accurate in March can mislead by August without a word of it changing. Sara re-checks the offers and only then moves the verification date, which is the rule the whole site runs on: a date never moves unless a person has actually looked.
Because most of that work lands as updates to existing pages rather than new ones, her name appears far more often as “Updated by” than as an author archive entry. The archive undercounts her considerably.
Past contributors: Gouri Bhawnani, Research & Compliance Writer, wrote on licensing and regulatory accuracy for this site. Her work remains published under her name.
How We Make Money
Readers pay nothing. We earn a commission when someone opens an account at a site through one of our links.
That is a conflict of interest and we would rather name it than manage it quietly.
Worth separating two things that get muddled. Commission does not buy a rating. A score comes out of what happened when we opened an account and tested the site, and no operator has ever bought one or bought its way out of a bad one. Order is a different question. A site has to earn its place on the list by testing well, but among sites that have, commercial terms can affect which one sits at the top.
Operators do not see pages before publication, do not get approval over wording, and cannot have criticism removed or a rating raised. Sites have been pulled from our recommendations for failing our standards while they were still earning us money. Our advertiser disclosure sets out the commission models in full.
What We Won’t Do
We do not write about sites we have not opened. We do not invent testing we did not do — no made-up withdrawal times, no invented support response times. We do not sell reader data, and we do not run pages whose only purpose is to carry a link.
We also do not cover every market. If a country is not named on this page, we do not have anyone playing there and we would rather say nothing than guess.
Get In Touch
If you have found an error, played at a site we recommend and had a different experience, or want to know more about how any of this works, we would like to hear from you. Reader reports are how we find out a site has changed, and several pointing the same way have changed verdicts before.
Our contact page has the routes in, or write to contact@thebingoonline.com directly.