A small desk with one job: read the paperwork.

Why we started

StoneReview was founded in 2026 by a small group of editors and analysts in London who had spent years working adjacent to the regulated gambling industry — in compliance, in payments, and in consumer journalism. The thing that pushed us into starting our own publication was a pattern we kept seeing: reviews that ran to two thousand words without once naming the company that actually held the licence.

That omission is not academic. In the UK market a large number of consumer-facing brands are white labels — front ends operated under somebody else's licence. The licensee is the party that holds your money, runs your identity checks, and answers to the regulator when something goes wrong. If a review does not tell you who that is, it has skipped the single most useful fact it could have given you.

So we built the publication around that fact rather than around it. Every brand page here opens with the licensed operator, the register account number and the operating licence number, and links directly to the Gambling Commission record so you can check us instead of trusting us.

What we are, precisely

We are an editorial publication. We are not a gambling operator and we are not an agent of one. We accept no deposits, hold no customer funds, run no wagering of any kind, and offer no product that can be wagered on. If you open an account with a brand we review, you do so with a company licensed by the Gambling Commission, under that company's terms, and your relationship is with them.

We are also not a community. There are no comments, no forums, no uploads and no reader-submitted ratings anywhere on this website. Every word published here is written and checked by our own desk. That is a deliberate choice: unmoderated contributions are a liability we are not willing to carry.

How we are funded

Some outbound links to reviewed brands are commercial. If you follow one and open an account, the operator may pay us a commission. It costs you nothing and it changes nothing about your terms. It is also the only revenue this publication has: we sell no advertising space, we accept no payment for coverage, and no brand can buy a score, a position or a sentence.

The separation is enforced by process rather than good intentions. Scores are set from the six-part check before any commercial arrangement is discussed. No operator reviews, previews or approves our copy. Drawbacks lists are never edited down. The full arrangement is set out on our Disclosure page, in plain language and without hedging.

Our editorial rules

• Register before opinion. No brand is covered until its domain has been located on the Gambling Commission public register and the relevant activity confirmed Active.
• Test with our own money. Deposits, verification and withdrawals are carried out by us on ordinary accounts, unannounced.
• Print the date. Every review carries the date it was last checked, because licence status and terms change.
• Correct in public. When we get something wrong we fix it and say on the page that we have.
• Safer gambling is not a footnote. Every review reports how far the limit controls are from the front door, and every page carries the 18+ mark and the BeGambleAware helpline.

Who this is for

Adults in the United Kingdom, aged 18 or over, who have already decided they want to gamble and would like to do it with a licensed operator whose payout behaviour is known rather than assumed. Nothing on this website is aimed at anyone under 18, and nothing here is an inducement to gamble. If you are looking for a reason to start, we are not it.