The arbitrage betting API that arrives already paired

Strip an arbitrage scanner down and it is a ranking engine: take every back price, find the opposing price, compute the margin, sort, alert. Each of those steps is only as good as its input. Miss a book and you miss its mispricings; feed it stale prices and it ranks opportunities that closed a minute ago. The data layer isn't a component of an arb product — it mostly is the product.

That puts three questions ahead of everything else on a shortlist: how many books, whether the back-vs-lay pairing is done for you, and how fresh the prices are. The field reference and sample responses in the API docs answer the first two in an afternoon; the live coverage dashboard shows the books we carry, their freshness and uptime before you talk to anyone.

Most odds APIs hand a scanner builder raw prices and a matching problem: normalise the books, resolve the same selection across them, pair each back price to a current exchange lay price, and keep that pipeline alive as markets move. That is months of engineering before the first opportunity is ranked. OddsRelay ships the layer inside the feed — every back price arrives paired to a lay price from Betfair, Smarkets or Matchbook, with a rating already computed. The exchange-lay page covers where that lay side comes from and how the pairing behaves.

Coverage decides how many opportunities exist to be found. The feed carries 60+ UK bookmakers with bet365 included as standard — a book UK arb margins often involve, and a common gap in raw feeds; the dedicated bet365 page covers it in full. The same pairing flows through all seven feed types — standard, each-way, extra-place, BOG, dutching, 2up and price-boost — so a scanner can rank beyond plain match odds.

A stale price is worse than a missing one for an arbitrage product, because it surfaces opportunities that no longer exist and burns user trust. OddsRelay polls pre-match prices on roughly a three-second cycle, monitored, with per-book freshness published. That cadence suits pre-match arbitrage: prices move, but on a timescale the cycle keeps up with.

What we won't claim is in-play. The feed is pre-match on a polling cycle; we don't ship sub-second streaming, so we don't sell in-play arbitrage on the back of it. If your product needs in-play execution speed you need a different class of feed, and a vendor who says so plainly beats one who lets you discover it in production.

The incumbents in this space mostly bundle the scanner and the data. OddsJam sells finished arbitrage alerts to end users, which is a different product from a feed you build on — our OddsJam comparison walks that distinction. OpticOdds serves the enterprise sportsbook tier with a US-first catalogue and sales-gated access; the OpticOdds comparison covers when that fits and when a UK-deep, already-paired feed is the better base. OddsRelay's lane is the supply layer: you own the scanner, the ranking logic and the users; we deliver the paired data underneath.

Anyone selling arbitrage data owes you this plainly: genuine surebets are rare, small and short-lived. Bookmakers move, exchanges rebalance, and the margin that existed at detection often isn't there at execution. A good feed makes your product better at surfacing arbitrage — more books, pairs already rated, prices fresh — but no feed makes returns certain, and we won't imply otherwise. We've written up the mechanics in why surebets disappear.

What the data layer changes is your odds of catching the ones that do appear. The arbitrage use-case shows how scanner builders wire the rated pairs in, and the feed already powers a leading UK matched-betting platform whose oddsmatcher consumes exactly this output. If you'd rather test than take our word, a free trial key puts the paired feed into your own scanner this week.