Responsible data supply for betting products

An odds-data supplier sells prices to other businesses and takes no bets itself. The wager, the player and whatever permissions they bring belong to the product the customer runs.

Is an odds-data supplier a betting operator?

No. An operator accepts stakes, holds customer balances and settles results. A data supplier does none of those. It delivers structured prices over an API to another business, and that business decides what to build with them.

OddsRelay is a supplier in that sense. There is nothing in the feed a punter can fund, stake or settle.

The feed carries prices and their sources

Each matched board pairs a bookmaker's back price with exchange lay prices from Betfair, Smarkets, Matchbook and BETDAQ. Every lay offer carries available, the money on offer at that price, and the boards are liquidity-gated. The rating and qualifying loss are simple arithmetic on the pair, and the oddsmatcher widget shows them.

{
  "name": "Arsenal",
  "back": [{ "bookmaker": "william_hill", "price": 2.9, "link": null }],
  "lay":  [{ "exchange": "betfair_exchange", "price": 3.0, "available": 175, "link": null }]
}

That split matters for responsibility as well as engineering. The feed states who offered which price and when the board was built. Anything that turns a price into a recommendation, a promotion or a stake happens in the customer's product, where the customer's own obligations apply.

We think that is how a supplier should work. Sources belong in the feed, and verdicts belong in the product that answers for them.

Accurate data is the supplier's main duty

A supplier that overstates coverage or hides the age of a price passes the risk to every product built on it. Responsible supply means the claim can be checked. The coverage page shows each venue and sport as live or interrupted, and GET /v2/coverage returns the same status without a key.

The published figure is 140+ bookmakers, 60+ of them live in the UK & Ireland. The feed serves that one region and claims nothing beyond it. We don't publish how prices are collected. We publish what the feed delivers and the live status of each venue, which is the part a customer can hold us to.

Age is visible in the data as well. Every response carries meta.processed_at, the time the board was built. A matched board's meta.last_seen records the last read per venue and sport, so now minus that time is an upper bound on a price's age. Every product on sale is held to a maximum update time of 10–20 s.

The feed drops or hides no row for age. A product that shows prices to the public should pick its own cutoff from those timestamps, because that product is the one a player sees. The freshness guide shows the calculation.

The obligations around the player stay with you

Anything that touches the player sits with the business that serves them. That typically includes age checks, safer-gambling tools, the rules on gambling marketing and any licence the product needs. A supplier cannot hold those for you, and a data licence does not replace one.

Display is part of that. Once a price appears on your site or in your app, the way it is presented and the offers placed beside it are your marketing, even though a supplier's feed produced the number.

Whether a given product needs a licence depends on what it does and who uses it. An odds-comparison page, an oddsmatcher and a sportsbook sit in different places. The answer for each comes from the regulator's own guidance and your legal advisers. Nothing in this post is legal advice.

Questions to put to any supplier

• Does it take bets or hold player funds anywhere in its business? A supplier that also operates has two sets of interests in the same prices.
• Can you check its coverage claim yourself, venue by venue, before you sign anything?
• Does each response say when its prices were read, so your product can apply its own age limit?
• Does the data carry its sources, or a verdict you cannot audit? A price pair can be checked against the bookmaker and the exchange. A score cannot.

The wider buying checklist is in the guide to choosing an odds data provider, and evaluating coverage covers the venue-by-venue check in detail.

Check the feed against your own product

Read the quickstart for the response shape. When you want to test it behind your own product, request access.

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