How to choose an odds API for a betting site (checklist)
Every odds API vendor says their feed is fast and reliable. That tells you nothing. This checklist is the set of questions we would ask if we were buying a feed for our own betting site, with the answers you should expect and the ones that should worry you.
1. Coverage: which sports and which markets
Start with what your players actually bet on. In India that is cricket first, then soccer and tennis, with horse racing and baseball as extras. Ask for the exact list of competitions, not just sports: a feed that covers international cricket but drops domestic T20 leagues will leave your site empty for weeks at a time.
Then ask which market types are included. Match odds alone is the minimum. A cricket page that players recognise needs match odds, bookmaker odds and fancy (session) markets side by side, because that is what the large Indian sites show. Our Match Odds plan covers cricket, soccer, tennis, horse racing and baseball for ₹50,000 per month; adding fancy takes it to ₹90,000 and adding bookmaker odds as well to ₹130,000.
2. Latency and update frequency
Ask how far behind the source the feed runs and how it is delivered. A feed that updates within a second of Betfair is fine for in-play betting; one that updates every five seconds is not, because television is ahead of it and players will use that. Ask whether you can subscribe to pushes or must poll, and whether polling is rate-limited. A limited poll rate is a hidden latency cost.
- Update within one second of the source for in-play markets
- No request cap, so you can poll as often as your architecture needs
- Suspend and resume events delivered as state changes, not inferred from missing prices
3. Failover: what happens when a source breaks
Every upstream source has outages. The question is whether your site goes dark with it. A feed that aggregates more than one source and lets you switch between them keeps you trading through an upstream problem. We take match odds from three sources for this reason, and the live demo shows the same market from each source so you can see them disagree and recover in real time.
4. Settlement and results
Odds are only half of a market. If the API does not also tell you the result and the settled side, you will end up settling by hand or scraping scorecards, and both go wrong under load. Confirm that every market you can offer has a result in the same feed, that voided markets are flagged as voided, and that corrected results are republished so your settlement job can re-run safely.
5. Pricing model
There are two models in the market: fixed monthly rent and revenue share. Revenue share looks cheap on day one and becomes the largest line in your cost base as you grow, and it gives the vendor a reason to look at your turnover. Fixed rent in INR with unlimited requests is predictable and easier to explain to a partner or investor. Whatever you pick, get the price for the full bundle you will actually run, not the headline single-sport figure.
6. Integration effort and support
Ask for a sandbox key before you sign anything, and time how long it takes your developer to render one live match from the sample responses. If the vendor cannot give you a working key within a day, that is how support will feel later. Reference code in the stack you use, a named developer on WhatsApp during integration, and a realistic go-live estimate of about a week are what a well-run feed vendor offers by default.
7. Compliance and data rights
Confirm that the vendor has the right to redistribute the odds and video it sells you, and ask what happens to your contract if an upstream source withdraws. Keep your own logs of every price shown and every bet accepted; when a player disputes a settlement, the log is your evidence, and no vendor keeps it for you.
The short version
- Sports and competitions listed by name, not by category
- Match odds, bookmaker and fancy from the same vendor
- Sub-second updates, no request cap, explicit suspend events
- More than one upstream source with a switch you control
- Results and voids in the feed, republished on correction
- Fixed INR rent, sandbox on day one, developer on chat
Key takeaways
- Judge an odds API on competition coverage, latency and failover, not on marketing claims
- Cricket pages need match odds, bookmaker and fancy together; buy them as a bundle
- Insist on results in the same feed so settlement is automatic
- Fixed monthly rent with unlimited requests is cheaper than revenue share once you have volume