What is bonus buy in slots?

What does a bonus buy actually do?

A bonus buy feature — sometimes labelled "feature buy" — is an optional button, usually sat somewhere near the main spin control, that lets a player pay a set price to enter the slot's bonus round directly. Instead of spinning the base game over and over hoping to land the symbols that trigger free spins or a similar feature, the player pays the listed cost once and is dropped straight into that round.

It doesn't replace the normal way of triggering the feature — most slots with bonus buy still let the bonus round land naturally through ordinary spins too. It's an alternative path in, aimed at players who specifically want to see or play the bonus round without grinding through the base game first.

How is the price set, and what does it actually buy?

The provider sets the price as a multiple of the current base stake, and it's fixed for a given game — it isn't negotiable or randomised. Costs vary a fair amount from title to title and often scale with how strong the bonus round on offer is; a straightforward free spins entry tends to cost less than a version that also guarantees extra multipliers or a richer symbol set going in.

What that price buys is entry into the round, not a result. Once the bonus round starts, it runs on exactly the same underlying probabilities as it would if triggered naturally — the same paytable, the same reel behaviour, the same range of possible outcomes. Paying for entry doesn't skew what happens after the door opens; it only skips the part where you'd otherwise need to land the trigger symbols yourself.

Does bonus buy change a game's RTP?

It can, and where a provider publishes a separate RTP figure for the bonus buy mode, we note it in the game's fact table alongside the base RTP. The two numbers cover different populations of play — one is the return across all spins including the base game, the other is specific to entering the bonus round by paying for it — so a mismatch between them isn't a mistake, it's two different measurements of the same underlying maths model.

Where a provider hasn't published a separate bonus buy RTP, we don't estimate one. The base RTP figure on the fact table refers to normal play unless we've stated otherwise.

It's also worth being clear about what bonus buy doesn't do: it doesn't make a bonus round more likely to pay well, and it doesn't shift the odds of any individual spin inside that round in the buyer's favour. Every outcome once the round starts is drawn from the same probability distribution as a naturally triggered version of the same feature. What's being purchased is certainty of entry, not better odds once you're there — a distinction that's easy to lose sight of given how the feature is often marketed.

Why is bonus buy restricted in some places?

Regulators in a number of jurisdictions have raised concerns that letting a player skip straight to a bonus round — effectively paying a lump sum for a single, faster-paced spin at a big outcome — sits closer to a high-intensity form of play than they're comfortable licensing. The UK Gambling Commission is the most widely cited example: bonus buy and similar "feature buy" mechanics have been restricted for real-money play under UK licence conditions since 2021.

Because of rules like this, the exact same slot can ship with the bonus buy button present in some markets and stripped out entirely in others. That's a decision made by the operator and provider for a specific licensed market, not a change to the game's core maths — the base game and its natural bonus trigger work identically either way.

How does this apply to our demos?

None of the market restrictions above touch free demo play, since there's no real-money stake or licensing question involved. Where a game's demo build includes a bonus buy option, we say so in the feature list, and trying it costs nothing beyond fun credits either way. Where a provider's demo build has the option removed — often mirroring a real-money restriction in the version they've made available to us — we don't fabricate a version that isn't actually there; the fact table only lists what we can confirm from our own capture of the game running.