Guide To Free & Cheap Bingo

Online Bingo On A Budget

Online bingo can be a fantastic form of entertainment, especially if you sign up at a site that has hosted chat rooms where you can meet and interact with other players.

It can, however, get rather expensive! If you’re on a budget, there are quite a few things you can do to help with that.

First and foremost, if you want to make your deposit and bonus stretch as far as possible for maximum entertainment value, the price and number of tickets you buy are just as important as the actual size of the welcome offer. For example, if you’ve claimed a £30 bingo bonus and your favourite game is 90 ball bingo, you could:

• Play 100 games of bingo if you buy a strip of 5p tickets for each
• Play 50 games of bingo if you buy a strip of 10p tickets for each
• Play just 20 games of bingo if you buy a strip of 25p tickets for each

Buy more than one strip of tickets per game, or venture into the realms of 50p or £1 tickets, and your bonus could be gone in less than an hour!

Luckily there are plenty of lower cost options around:

• Penny Bingo
• Single Ticket Bingo
• Free Bingo

Penny Bingo

In penny bingo, tickets are priced at 1p or 2p each. So in a 90 ball game, you can buy a strip of 6 tickets for just 6p or 12p. In the example with the £30 bingo bonus, you could play a whopping 500 games of 1p bingo if you bought a strip of tickets for each – that’s a lot of entertainment!

You might think that with such a tiny ticket price, the prizes would also be very small, but this is not necessarily true as some players react to the low ticket price by simply buying more tickets, pushing up the prize value. This means that penny bingo games at popular sites can end up with an extremely large number of tickets in play (we’re talking tens of thousands) resulting in a game which is over quite quickly and where each individual card has a vanishingly small chance of winning anything.

If you’re the kind of player who prefers to win little and often rather than having a tiny chance of winning a big prize, you probably won’t enjoy this type of penny bingo and will find that single ticket bingo (which we’ll come on to next) suits you better.

For those who relish the tiny chance of winning a substantial prize, on the other hand, penny bingo rooms can be just the thing.

Some sites (mostly big names such as Gala Bingo and Sky Bingo) have dedicated penny bingo rooms with 1p and 2p games running all day, every day. There was even one – the Dragonfish powered Fancy Bingo – that specialised in penny bingo (it’s now closed and Dragonfish don’t have any penny bingo to speak of). At other sites, you’ll find that penny bingo only runs at certain times of day or as part of special promotions.

Where to play penny bingo

If you’re looking for penny bingo games, here are some of the best places to find them:

• The Pragmatic Play bingo network has an 80 ball room with tickets priced at 1p and also runs 1p (and 2p) games in the 30 ball speed bingo room. Some 2p games also run in their 90 ball rooms. Some Pragmatic sites including PlayOJO and bet365 run penny bingo games in their non network bingo rooms.
• Entain bingo sites run 1p and 2p games in their 30 ball, 75 ball and 90 ball bingo rooms. All in all, they have one of the best ranges of cheap and penny bingo games you’ll find anywhere.
• The Playtech bingo network has a 90 ball penny bingo room and many Playtech bingo sites including Betfred Bingo and Mecca Bingo also run 1p and 2p games in exclusive bingo rooms.
• The Relax bingo network which can be found at Unibet and bingo.com has a 75 ball 5 line penny bingo room.
• Gamesys bingo sites have a 90 ball penny bingo room and so does MrQ.
• tombola do low cost bingo very well indeed. Their Bingo Lite 90 ball rooms have a ticket price of 2p (10p for a strip of 6) and their Paper game has tickets priced at 1p each with a maximum purchase of 5 per game. There’s also a couple of 5p bingo games with a low maximum purchase of 3 or 4 tickets.

Not so great for penny bingo

Even penny bingo can get expensive if you buy the maximum number of tickets per game; this varies, but can be as many as 120. £1.20 per game and suddenly your deposit and bonus don’t go very far at all! Indeed, one game that is technically penny bingo but which you’ll probably want to avoid if you are on a budget is Playtech’s Spirit Twister as you have to buy 100 tickets in each game, making it £1 per play.

You’ll probably also want to avoid all Dragonfish sites as most don’t have any penny bingo to speak of (a few have a room that is open lunchtimes only).

One-off operators like Happy Tiger rarely have any penny bingo.  MrQ is the exception here, and while BingoPlus don’t have any penny bingo games in their unique live bingo product area, they also have Pragmatic Play bingo rooms which do have penny games.

Single Ticket Bingo

In a single ticket bingo game, each player has just one ticket to play with, so everyone has the same chance of winning. To ensure that the game still has plenty to hold a player’s interest, these games tend to be graphically rich, sometimes with symbols replacing numbers. They are also very well suited to mobile devices as the single ticket sits very nicely on a phone screen.

Single ticket bingo games are usually but not always multi-stake, meaning that you can choose from a range of stake levels and the prizes are adjusted accordingly. For example, if the full house prize is £5 at a stake level of 10p, it would be £25 at a stake level of 50p and £50 at a stake level of £1.

Most single ticket games have a minimum stake of 10p and there are plenty to choose from – but only if you play at a Playtech or Entain powered bingo site or at tombola! Pragmatic Play, Gamesys and Dragonfish don’t offer any single ticket games at all.

Playtech Single Ticket Bingo Games

• Cash Cubes – minimum ticket price 10p – 36 ball
• Clover Rollover Bingo – minimum ticket price 25p – 50 ball
• Bouncy Balls Bingo – minimum ticket price 10p – 60 ball
• Mystic Meg (Sun Bingo) – minimum ticket price 10p – 50 ball
• Winning Headlines (Sun Bingo) – minimum ticket price 10p – 36 ball
• Buzz Bingo Blast – minimum ticket price 25p – 36 ball
• Burst Bingo (Mecca) – minimum ticket price 10p – 50 ball
• Emoji Bingo (Mecca) – minimum ticket price 25p – 50 ball
• Giddy Up Bingo (Betfred) – minimum ticket price 10p – 50 ball

Entain Single Ticket Bingo Games

• Bingo Beats – minimum ticket price 10p – 50 ball
• Fishin Frenzy Bingo (Entain version) – minimum ticket price 10p – 50 ball

Tombola Single Ticket Bingo Games

• Stakeback – minimum ticket price 10p – 30 ball
• The Machine – minimum ticket price 10p – 40 ball with 2 prizes
• Potion – minimum ticket price 5p – 45 ball with 3 prizes
• Bloom – minimum ticket price 10p – 45 ball with 2 prizes
• Pulse – minimum ticket price 10p – 36 ball
• Blocks – minimum ticket price 10p – 60 ball with 2 prizes
• Reel Bingo – minimum ticket price 10p – 35 ball with 2 prizes
• Nevada – minimum ticket price 10p – 52 ball with 4 prizes
• Paint by Numbers – minimum ticket price 10p – 45 ball
• Jigsaw – minimum ticket price 10p – 45 ball with 2 prizes
• bingo 40 – minimum ticket price 10p – 40 ball with 4 prizes
• bingo 60 – minimum ticket price 25p – 60 ball with 5 prizes

As you can see from the list above, several of the tombola single ticket games have more than one prize.  Nevada for instance has 4 prizes in every game. Potion also represents excellent value, with a minimum stake of 5p and 3 prizes in every game.

Even at a ticket price of 10p, a single ticket game can work out as no more expensive than a regular bingo game with 1p or 2p tickets (depending on how many tickets you usually buy for regular games). And it can definitely be better entertainment value because in a single ticket game, each player has an equal chance of winning (rather than being at a huge disadvantage if, for instance, you buy one strip of 6 tickets in a regular game while some of the other players max out at 120 tickets).

Free Bingo

There are any number of just for fun bingo games and apps on the internet and in the app stores (including our own free bingo card generators), but here we are only looking at free bingo where you can win real money or the equivalent.

Free Bingo Games

In a free bingo game, all of the players can claim free tickets. Some regular bingo rooms run free games from time to time, but it’s more usual for them to be run in a dedicated free bingo room.

PRO TIP – it’s much less hassle to play free bingo in a bingo room that ONLY runs free games. Why? Because if there’s a mixture of free and pay games, it’s easy for a player who is not paying VERY close attention to what is going on in the bingo room to buy max tickets to a pay game by mistake when they intended to claim tickets to a free game – and we know this does happen as we’ve seen people complaining about it in the chat at sites such as Sky Bingo.

If a game is open to all of a bingo site’s registered players, expect the prizes to be fairly inconsequential –  small amounts of cash, bingo bonus or even free tickets to other bingo games. Free bingo sessions with more substantial prizes do exist, but in order to be allowed into the bingo rooms they play in, you will usually have to fulfil some kind of spend or loyalty requirement.

It’s very common for free bingo rooms only to be open to players who have made a deposit and in some cases that’s not just any deposit, but a recent deposit – as at Dragonfish bingo sites where access to free bingo with a prize of just £2 is restricted to players who have made a deposit in the last 14 days, or at MrQ where there’s a free bingo room you can access for 30 days after depositing.

A few Dragonfish bingo sites including Woman Bingo also have what looks like a couple of very nice open access free bingo rooms but there’s a catch – they are sliding jackpot games and the chances of winning anything more than a few pence are minuscule.

IMPORTANT:  It’s very rare for free bingo games to have a pre-buy facility.  You will need to be in the room shortly before the game starts to claim tickets. If the free bingo games don’t run at a time convenient to you, tough.

As for where to play, Playtech bingo sites are streets ahead of everyone else when it comes to free bingo. For example:

• At Paddy Power Bingo there’s 6 hours of free bingo in the Paddy’s Free Bingo Room, every single day from noon until 6pm. There’s £10 of cash prizes in each 90 ball game. Paddy Power also run the “Bingoton Ballroom” promotion from time to time – meet the play requirement to gain entry to the premium free bingo room.
• At Mecca Bingo the Lucky For Some room gives out more than £1000 in free games every day. They alternate with pay games from 8pm until 10pm.
• Sun Bingo run a massive 60 free bingo games every day, in the Cabaret Room, all with the Roll On feature. Prizes vary and the promotion will run until further notice.

(Correct at time of writing in autumn 2025)

Newbie Free Bingo

Free bingo rooms for new players for a limited time after registration or first deposit used to be extremely common, but not many bingo sites have them now. Why?

• One reason is that these newbie rooms used to be advertised as e.g. “£5000 of free bingo” – which sounds amazing but actually referred to the total prize pool across all the games that the player could possibly join if they were in the bingo room for the maximum hours. This is no longer allowed as it was just too misleading – you’d have to play every game and win every single prize to reach those winnings. Now, operators are only allowed to advertise a monetary value for free bingo if pay tickets are sold for the same game, and it can only be the face value of the pay tickets.
• Another reason is that the world of online bingo is quite saturated, so there may simply not be enough new players at a time to make the newbie room fun to play in. It’s much more common these days for bingo sites to give the new players access to a premium bingo room along with all the existing players who’ve recently made a deposit, instead of having a free room just for newbies.

Free Bingo Tickets

Here, we’re talking about free bingo tickets that are given to players to redeem in real money bingo games. In early free bingo ticket promotions the free tickets were for specific games at specific times only, but in 2025 things have moved on and a free bingo tickets offer can be almost as flexible as a bingo bonus offer. The usual constraints are:

• The free bingo tickets will probably only be valid in some bingo rooms (at Playtech sites, for example, the rooms where free tickets can be used are marked with the “FT” tag)
• There will be a maximum face value for the tickets they can be redeemed against (at Playtech sites it’s usually 10p)
• In games where the prize pool is set by ticket sales, the face value of free tickets that are used usually doesn’t contribute. This puts players who are not using free tickets at a disadvantage because the prize pool doesn’t get as big as you would expect for the number of tickets in play. In effect, this reduces the Return to Player for players who pay for their tickets.  If you are purchasing bingo tickets with cash, you may want to avoid games where a lot of free tickets are likely to be in play or even play in cash only rooms.

One type of free bingo ticket promotion that is definitely worth looking out for is when the tickets are for a special promotional game which includes a community jackpot. In these games, a substantial portion of the prize pool is shared between all the tickets held by non winning players, so if you use free tickets you’re guaranteed to get at least something.

No Deposit Bingo

No deposit bingo is almost extinct in 2025. The way it worked was that bingo sites gave out bingo bonuses with no deposit required, which could then be spent in the bingo room of your choice. Nowadays, most no deposit offers are for slot spins not bingo and if you do come across a no deposit bingo offer it will almost certainly be for free bingo tickets not a bonus.

Mutant Forms of Free Bingo

Tournaments

Gala Bingo run free bingo tournaments which last for an hour. These are not real money bingo games; you get 36 tickets to use in the course of each tournament and score points by winning lines or features.  You need to pay very close attention throughout the hour as there’s only a short window for claiming tickets for the next game. The best points scorers win small amounts of cash or free bingo tickets which can be redeemed in their regular bingo rooms.

Tangible Prizes

Free bingo games which are part of special promotions sometimes have prizes of gadgets, holiday, shopping vouchers and the like rather than actual money.

Superbooks

“Free Or Superbooks” bingo games used to be extremely common at Playtech bingo sites, but you don’t see many of them any more.  And in my opinion, that’s no bad thing! Why?

• You can claim free tickets for Free Or Superbooks games, and/or buy Superbooks tickets that give greatly enhanced prizes if you win.  But of course, due to the large numbers of players claiming free tickets you’re extremely unlikely to win. If you’ve got cash to spend on bingo tickets, you’ll get better value from claiming free tickets in the Superbooks game and using your cash to buy tickets for regular bingo games.
• There’s also the chance that you might accidentally press the wrong button and max out on Superbooks tickets when you intended to claim free tickets – an expensive mistake to make!

Free Bingo – don’t overdo it!

Finally, a word of warning; some of the sites that offer free bingo games will eventually get annoyed if you play (in their view) too much free bingo and not enough pay bingo. Check the terms and conditions to see if there are any guidelines as to how much is too much.

Back in the 2010s, we heard of players who apparently overdid the free bingo at a Dragonfish site and ended up being banned from all Dragonfish bingo and slot sites – that’s a lot of sites to be banned from!  These days, you’re unlikely to be banned from anywhere, but you might be put on the naughty list for bonuses meaning you wouldn’t be able to take part in any offers or promotions (including free bingo) going forward.

Free Bingo – is it really free?

Play for free and win for real – sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? Well, it is and it isn’t. You can indeed win real cash and other prizes playing free bingo – but who pays for the prizes? When it comes down to it, the cost of the prizes comes out of the bingo site’s profits – and therefore, ultimately, is paid for by you, the players.
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Online Bingo on a Budget – FAQ

What is the cheapest way to play online bingo in the UK?

Sign up at a bingo site which offers plenty of free bingo games and low price bingo tickets.

How does penny bingo work and is it worth it?

In penny bingo games, tickets cost 1p or 2p each instead of the more usual 10p or 25p. This means you can play in many more bingo games for the same outlay, maximising entertainment.

Which bingo sites have the best free bingo games in 2025?

In 2025, Paddy Power Bingo, Sun Bingo and Mecca Bingo have the best free bingo games for UK players.

What’s the difference between single ticket bingo and regular bingo?

In regular bingo, you choose how many tickets to buy for the game with the maximum number often being 120. Each ticket has an equal chance of winning so the more you buy relative to other players, the better chance you have of winning something. In single ticket bingo, each player has just one ticket so everyone has an equal chance of winning.

Can you actually win money playing free online bingo games?

You can win real money playing free online bingo games but you will first need to register with the bingo site, be age verified and (usually) make a deposit before you are allowed into their free bingo rooms.

Are there any risks with free bingo or penny bingo games?

Online gambling is by its very nature a risky activity and you may lose some or all of your money.

What are the best bingo sites for playing on a budget?

The best bingo sites for players on a budget are tombola, Gala Bingo, Mecca Bingo, Buzz Bingo and Paddy Power.

Is single ticket bingo better value than 1p or 2p games?

Depending on how many bingo tickets you buy in a 1p or 2p bingo game, your money may go further if you play 10p single ticket bingo instead.

Why do some free bingo games require a deposit to join?

Free bingo games with worthwhile prizes are often used as rewards for players who deposit regularly. The ones that don’t require a deposit typically have very small prizes.

Which bingo networks offer the most budget-friendly games?

The Entain and Playtech bingo networks both offer a great selection of low cost bingo games.