Stars & Prizes is an independent guide to U.S. sweepstakes casinos. We open real accounts, claim the bonuses, play through the terms, and time every cash-out, then report back in plain English.
How we stay honest
We don’t earn commissions and we don’t accept payment for placement – every ranking comes purely from our own hands-on testing.
Why we started Stars & Prizes
Two things pushed us to build this site. First, sweepstakes casinos exploded across the U.S. between 2023 and 2026 without any single independent reviewer keeping honest score on payout speed, playthrough terms, and the real value of the first-purchase deals. Second, the sites themselves rarely explain the two-coin model in a way that a first-time visitor can actually parse in under a minute. We saw a whole category of legitimate, entertaining operators being lumped in with the shady end of the market simply because nobody was doing the boring work of testing each brand, top to bottom, on their own dime.
The result is a small team that treats every review like a lab experiment. We fund the accounts ourselves, we play through the terms in full, we run parallel tests against a control group of other brands the same week, and we publish the exact numbers we clocked. No influencer video budgets, no ghost-written recaps of press releases, no ranking swaps for a higher commission. If a brand slips down the board from one month to the next, it is because our timings said so, never because we got paid to move it.
Our testing philosophy
We build our monthly ranking around three principles. Reproducibility comes first. Any test we run needs to be repeatable by someone else with the same account and the same starting balance, or we do not publish it. Signal over vibes comes second. We would rather show a bar chart of cash-out times measured to the minute than write a sentence like “payouts feel fast.” Written for the newcomer comes third. If a section of a review cannot be understood by a reader who has never opened a sweepstakes account before, we rewrite it until it can.
Every brand goes through the same twelve-category battery. We check welcome bundle math, ongoing free routes, playthrough fairness, coin economics, support responsiveness (day and night), payment methods, verification friction, mobile experience, game library quality, promotion depth, terms transparency, and state availability. Each category is scored on a 0-5 scale and the twelve scores roll up into the headline grade. The full per-category breakdown for each site lives inside the individual review.
What we won’t do
A short but firm list. We will not accept payment for a ranking position. We will not publish a review that we have not personally tested with real money and a real cash-out. We will not link to any operator whose state-availability list is hidden or dishonest. We will not write “editors’ pick” copy for a brand that is currently under regulatory action, even if the affiliate deal is generous. And we will not run any promotion aimed at readers who are self-excluded, minors, or otherwise flagged in the responsible-gambling frameworks the brands themselves adhere to.
If we ever slip on any of those, we would rather you tell us, the contact address at the bottom of this page goes straight to a human editor, not a support queue.