Bonus buy explained: what a feature purchase costs and what it changes

A bonus buy lets a player skip the base game and pay a fixed price to start a feature straight away. It is one of the most visible changes in slot design over the past several years, and it sits in the menus of many games in the SlotsRanker catalogue. The idea sounds simple, but the details are not: prices vary widely, some games sell several different rounds, the long-run return of each option is often not published, and availability depends on where a game is offered. This guide works through the mechanics with published price lists and virtual-coin arithmetic. It does not recommend buying anything. It explains what the button does.

The price is a multiple of the stake, not a fixed number

Every feature purchase is quoted as a multiple of the current stake. A 100x buy at a 10-coin stake costs 1,000 coins; at a 50-coin stake it costs 5,000. Any win from the bought round is valued against that same base stake, so the maths scales with the stake chosen.

The purchase guarantees entry to the round. It does not guarantee any particular result. A bought round can end with a return well below its price, and the maximum win cap still applies. Sweet Bonanza 2500 caps any round at 25,000x the bet; a 1,000x purchase therefore spends 4% of that ceiling before the first spin.

Four menus compared

Studios structure their menus differently. These are the published options from four games in our catalogue, taken from their reviews:

Sweet Bonanza 2500 (Pragmatic Play), where offered:

Gates of Olympus 2500 (Pragmatic Play): 100x, 250x, 500x and 1,250x, one price for each of the four free spins modes that the base game otherwise assigns by wheel. Buying lets the player choose the mode.

Duck Hunters (Nolimit City): 70x for Duck Hunt Spins, 200x for Hawk Eye Spins, 600x for Big Game Spins, and a 235x Lucky Draw that gives a 50% chance of Duck Hunt and 25% each of the other two.

Pirots 5 (ELK Studios, X-iter): 50x for the Cursed Temple coin game, 100x for the standard bonus and 250x for the Super Bonus.

Two patterns stand out. Higher tiers buy stronger starting conditions rather than more spins. And randomised options like Duck Hunters' Lucky Draw are a price for a spread of outcomes, not a discount: at 235x, it costs more than three Duck Hunt buys, and half the time it delivers exactly one.

Ante bets and boosted spins sit on the same spectrum

Between normal play and a direct purchase there is often a middle ground: paying more per spin to change what each spin can do.

Super Spins are an unusual design. They give up the natural bonus entirely in exchange for guaranteed modifiers on base spins. Duck Hunters goes further with Day boosters, such as a 3,000x spin that starts every grid cell at an x1024 multiplier.

The RTP question nobody can answer from the menu

The headline RTP of a slot normally describes standard play. Whether each purchase option returns the same figure is a separate question, and the answer is often unpublished.

• Pragmatic Play has not published separate RTPs for Sweet Bonanza 2500's three buys, according to our review.
• ELK Studios does not publish separate figures for each Pirots 5 X-iter mode.
• For Duck Hunters, a feature buy RTP of 96.07% is commonly listed, marginally above the 96.05% top configuration.
• For The Dog House Megaways 1000, no source reviewed publishes separate figures for its 100x, 500x and 2,500x buys.

Where no figure exists, it is not safe to assume every option returns the headline RTP. It may be slightly higher, slightly lower or equal. UK technical standards require information about the likelihood of winning to be easily available before play, so a game's information screen is the place to look for mode-specific figures when they exist.

Worked example: buying versus waiting, in virtual coins

This is arithmetic, not advice. Sweet Bonanza 2500 publishes a free spins frequency of about 1 in 450.57 spins in normal play.

Take a 10-coin stake:

• Waiting for the bonus. On average, about 450 spins pass between natural triggers. That is roughly 4,506 coins staked. Those spins are not a pure cost, because base-game wins return part of it, and the average time between triggers says nothing about when the next one will arrive.
• Buying the bonus. The 100x option costs 1,000 coins and starts the round immediately.

The comparison looks lopsided, but it hides two things. The base spins return coins along the way, and the studio sets the purchase price with the bought round's own long-run return in mind, a figure that, as noted above, is often unpublished. The Ante Bet sits between these: it raises the per-spin cost to 25 coins while making the trigger roughly eight times more frequent.

Now put that on the SlotsRanker balance. A new profile starts with 10,000 virtual coins. At a 10-coin stake, one 1,000x Super Free Spins 2 purchase would cost the entire starting balance. One 100x buy uses a tenth of it. Seeing how fast a balance moves under purchases is one of the more instructive things demo play can show, precisely because nothing of value is at stake.

Why the UK regulator has taken a hard line

In January 2020, the Gambling Commission warned online operators after finding six licensees offering feature buy-in facilities on slots. It said the option to purchase a feature raised serious social responsibility concerns, noting that the relevant standards say products must not actively encourage customers to chase losses or increase their stake. All six removed the feature, and further licensees were told to remove games with the option to buy a feature.

This is why the reviews in our catalogue repeatedly say "where offered". Trade coverage of Sweet Bonanza 2500 noted that special bets and buys are available only in certain markets, and our Duck Hunters review records that its buy options are widely reported as unavailable in the UK. A demo can show a buy button that a version elsewhere does not have. Our demo play guide covers other ways demos can differ.

Reading a purchase screen before pressing anything

1. Confirm the base stake. The price is multiplied by it.
2. Read what each tier guarantees. Minimum multipliers, sticky features or extra spins.
3. Check whether the natural trigger is disabled. Super Spins modes remove it.
4. Look for a mode-specific RTP. If none is shown, do not assume one.
5. Note the cap. The maximum win applies to bought rounds too.
6. Decide a limit in advance. Purchases move balances quickly. Our guide to playing responsibly has practical ways to set one.

How SlotsRanker treats bonus buys

The bonus buy tag in our catalogue appears only where the published game record supports it, and it is never applied to crash, table or card games. A purchase option does not earn extra SR Score points on its own; the scoring guide explains how features are counted.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• gamblingcommission.gov.uk/news/article/games-warning-for-online-operators
• gamblingcommission.gov.uk/standards/remote-gambling-and-software-technical-standards/rts-14-…
• gamblingcommission.gov.uk/standards/remote-gambling-and-software-technical-standards/rts-3-r…
• pragmaticplay.com/en/games/sweet-bonanza-2500
• pragmaticplay.com/en/news/pragmatic-play-turns-up-the-flavour-in-sweet-bonanza-2500