Been through heaps of these over the years and honestly most of the so-called free sign-up deals are pretty ordinary once you click into the fine print. You see a nice little teaser on the front page, then it turns into 50x wagering, tiny max cashout, half the games excluded, and the spins are stuck on some random slot no one was gonna play anyway. If you're just having a stickybeak and not expecting much, fair enough, but plenty of them are built to sound better than they actually are.
The ones I rate are the simple ones - credit lands straight away, terms are clear, wagering isn't cooked, and the cashout cap isn't insultingly low. I also check whether pokies count fully, how long you've got before it expires, and whether they make you do the whole ID circus before you can even touch a small withdrawal. Nothing worse than jagging a decent little win off free spins then finding out you can only pull fifty bucks and need to send in half your life story first.
If I was ranking these offers from an experienced punter point of view, most sit in the 'not worth the mucking around' pile, a few are alright for a no-risk spin, and very few are genuinely good. Keen to hear what others reckon though - any recent ones that were actually fair, or are they still mostly the same old bait with a shiny new banner slapped on?