Before coming to me one of my customers contacted five iGaming compliance firms to understand how the market worked. Three did not respond at all. One replied with "it depends on the scope" and asked to schedule a discovery call. One sent a proposal two weeks later with a number that bore no relationship to anything my customers had found through his own research.

His experience is not unusual. It is the standard buying experience in this industry.

The Standard Model and Why It Exists

Most compliance consultancies operate on a custom scoping model. The client describes what they need, the consultant assesses the complexity, a proposal is written, and a fee is agreed. The stated justification is that every engagement is different: different jurisdictions, different corporate structures, different risk profiles and a gut-feel assessment about the maximum budget you can afford.

Saying that each application will have its unique elements which can create additional work. An MGA application for a complex group structure with five UBOs spread across three jurisdictions is a lot more work than an Anjouan application for a single-UBO startup.

But the variation in work is not as extreme as some pricing quotes imply. The scope of an Anjouan licence application is well defined. So is a MGA application. The document checklist is published. The regulator fees are public. The compliance policy requirements are known and stable. The range of possible outcomes is bounded.

It is possible to quote a fixed price for this work. Most firms choose not to, because the open-ended model protects their margins. Opacity is not a byproduct of complexity, it is a feature of the commercial model.

There is a secondary reason the model persists: it is self-reinforcing. Buyers who have only ever seen custom proposals assume that is simply how professional services work in this sector. They accept the discovery call, wait for the proposal, and treat the process as normal. It is normal, in the sense that everyone does it. That does not make it necessary.

What Pricing Opacity Costs the Buyer

When you cannot compare prices, you cannot make an informed buying decision. You are relying entirely on the consultant's own assessment of the work required. That creates a significant information imbalance, and that imbalance tends to resolve in the consultant's favour.

Three specific problems follow from this.

Scope creep. The initial estimate grows after you have committed. New line items appear. Work that should have been in the original scope gets billed separately. By the time you notice, you are already mid-engagement.

Hidden fees. Disbursements, regulator fees, and third-party costs that were not included in the original number surface later. Sometimes these are genuine pass-throughs. Often they were foreseeable from the start.

Anchoring. The first number you hear becomes your reference point, even if it bears no relationship to the actual cost of the work. Once you have mentally accepted a figure, it is difficult to re-evaluate it objectively.

Operators regularly pay consultants €15,000–€20,000 on top of Anjouan's €17,000 regulatory fee. The application itself involves a bounded, well-understood set of compliance documents, nowhere near that price in actual work. The margin is information asymmetry, and published pricing collapses it the moment buyers can see it.

There is also a time cost that rarely gets counted. Every week spent chasing proposals, waiting for callbacks, and comparing numbers that were calculated on different bases is a week not spent on product, operations, or launch. For an operator trying to move quickly, that delay has real commercial value attached to it.

Why ICOS Publishes Fixed Prices

We publish fixed prices for every jurisdiction we cover. You can see what an Anjouan application costs and what a Curaçao application costs without speaking to anyone. No discovery call required. No proposal to wait for.

The reason is simple: the work is definable. The document checklist for each jurisdiction is known. Regulatory fees are published by the regulators themselves. The compliance document set is bounded by the regulator's own requirements. If the scope is known, the price can be known.

That does not mean every engagement is identical. Complex corporate structures, multiple jurisdictions, and unusual regulatory histories do create additional work. I am not pretending otherwise. But even those variables can be scoped and priced before work begins, not after you have already committed to a firm.

Fixed pricing does not mean rigid pricing. It means the client knows the number before they commit, and that number does not change unless the scope changes by mutual agreement. That is a straightforward standard. The industry just does not apply it.

What the Process Looks Like in Practice

Here is what ICOS's model looks like from the client side.

You fill out the intake form. It takes about three minutes. We review it and, within 24 hours, you receive a fixed-price quote with a clear scope of work attached. If you want to proceed, the scope is documented, the price is agreed, and work begins.

If the scope changes during the engagement, for example if you decide to add a second jurisdiction after work has started, that change is scoped separately and priced before it happens. There are no surprise invoices. No disbursement schedules that appear after the fact.

The regulator fees are listed separately in every quote so you can see exactly what goes to the regulator and what goes to ICOS. These are two distinct figures. They are always presented as two distinct figures.

The Objection and the Honest Answer

The standard objection to published pricing is that it cannot account for complexity. That is fair to a point.

But the answer to complexity is not to hide all pricing. The answer is to publish a base price for standard engagements and state clearly what falls outside that scope. An operator looking at a standard Anjouan B2C application with one or two UBOs is not dealing with an unusually complex situation. Neither is an operator applying to Curaçao with a straightforward ownership structure. These are common, well-understood cases.

The vast majority of enquiries we receive fall squarely within the published pricing. The ones that do not get a separate scoping conversation and a separate quote before work begins. Both sides know where they stand before any money changes hands.

This is not a novel business model. It is how most professional services work when the practitioners are confident enough in their own work to commit to a number in advance.

I would also push back on the idea that complexity is as common as the industry implies. Consultants have a commercial incentive to present every engagement as uniquely complex. That framing justifies a higher fee and a longer timeline. In reality, the majority of applications we see involve straightforward corporate structures and well-documented ownership chains. Treating those cases as complex is not an accurate assessment. It is a pricing strategy.

The Bottom Line

Our pricing is on this website. If your situation is straightforward, you already have your answer. If it is not, the intake form will get you a fixed quote within 24 hours.

No discovery call. No two-week wait. No proposal that arrives with a number you have never seen before and no context for how it was reached.

That is the standard we hold ourselves to. It should be the standard across the industry.