Betfair API for betting sites in India: what you get and what it costs
Most Indian betting sites show Betfair exchange prices, but very few of them talk to Betfair directly. This post explains what a Betfair API feed contains, why operators buy it through a data provider, which markets you should expect, and what it costs per month.
What the Betfair exchange gives you
Betfair is an exchange: players back and lay against each other rather than against a bookmaker, so every market has a ladder of back prices and lay prices with the money available at each level. For an operator this is the most liquid and most trusted price source for cricket, soccer and tennis, and it is what players in India compare your site against. A Betfair API feed delivers that ladder, market by market, as the exchange updates it.
- Match odds with the best three back and lay prices and their sizes
- Market status: open, suspended, closed, and in-play flags
- Event and market ids you can use to build your own event tree
- Results and settled selections for each market once it closes
Why operators use a provider instead of a direct account
A direct Betfair developer account requires an approved application, ongoing key fees, compliance with the exchange's terms on redistribution and a jurisdiction that Betfair serves. Indian operators generally cannot meet those conditions, and even those that can end up building the same normalisation layer everyone else builds: mapping market ids, handling stream reconnects, and translating suspensions into their own state machine.
A provider feed does that once and sells the result. You get the Betfair prices already cleaned into JSON, the same structure for every sport, a sandbox for testing, and a support channel. More importantly, you get failover. Our Betfair match odds are one of three sources in the same feed, so when the exchange stream stalls, which it does, you switch to a second source and keep trading.
Markets included
The Betfair API plan covers match odds for cricket, soccer, tennis, horse racing and baseball. On top of match odds, most Indian sites need two more things that Betfair alone does not give you in a usable form: bookmaker odds, which are fixed prices set by a trading desk with wider limits, and fancy markets, the run-based session bets that dominate cricket betting here. Both are available in the same feed so that one integration covers the whole cricket page.
- Betfair match odds for five sports, ₹50,000 per month
- Bookmaker match odds, ₹40,000 per month
- Match Fancy including Betfair fancy, Khhadda, manual and Type D fancy, ₹50,000 per month
- Match Odds and Fancy Combo, ₹90,000 per month
- Fancy, Match Odds and Bookmaker together, ₹130,000 per month
What it costs and how it is billed
All plans are a fixed monthly rent in INR with unlimited API requests. There is no per-bet fee and no revenue share, so the cost of the feed does not rise with your turnover. A site running the full cricket package pays ₹130,000 per month regardless of whether it handles ten thousand or ten million rupees of stakes. Payment is monthly; there is no long-term contract to sign before you have seen the feed working.
How integration goes
You receive an API key and sandbox access on the day you sign up. The usual order of work is: pull the event list, render match odds for one live match, wire the suspend flag to your bet button, then add bookmaker and fancy on the same page. Sample responses are on the live demo page, where you can also view the raw JSON from each source. Reference code is provided, and a developer stays on WhatsApp through the integration. Most teams are live within a week.
Things to check before going live
- Your bet acceptance checks the market status on the server, not in the browser
- You cap stakes below the size available at the price you are showing
- Your settlement job reads results from the feed and is safe to re-run
- You have tested switching sources mid-match in the sandbox
Key takeaways
- A Betfair API feed gives you exchange back and lay prices, status and results, cleaned into JSON
- Providers exist because direct accounts are impractical for Indian operators and because failover needs more than one source
- Betfair match odds are ₹50,000 per month; the full cricket bundle with fancy and bookmaker is ₹130,000
- Fixed rent, unlimited requests, sandbox on day one, live in about a week