More than an odds feed
An odds feed tells you what a price is. A sportsbook needs to know much more: whether the market is open right now, whether this customer may stake this much on it, how much the book stands to lose if the selection wins, and when the bet is won or lost. Teams that start with a feed alone end up writing suspension rules, liability tables and settlement scripts by hand.
The RealTimeBets sportsbook API brings those parts together. Prices and market states arrive from the same engine that later settles them, so the selection a customer backed is the same object that gets resulted. There is no mapping layer between a pricing vendor and a results vendor to keep in sync.
You stay in charge of the parts that make your book yours: the customer account, the wallet, the bet slip, the promotions you run within your licence and the look of the site. The API does the live maths behind them.
The bet lifecycle step by step
- Price. The engine recomputes every live market each second and publishes the price with its implied probability and margin.
- State. A dangerous incident such as a goal, a card or a break of serve flips affected micro-markets to suspended for a few seconds, then reopens them with fresh prices.
- Accept. Before you confirm a bet, a risk check returns accepted, reduced or rejected based on market liability and the stake cap for that customer.
- Result. The incident timeline resolves the market and every bet you recorded on it settles as won or lost, with the payout.
- Notify. A signed bet.settled webhook tells your backend which bets to pay, so your wallet moves money only on a verified message.
Steps one, two, four and five are on every plan, and micro-markets through the API start on Growth. Risk checks are part of Growth and Enterprise, which is where most books running live markets sit. The sportsbook risk management page covers step three in detail.
Request shapes your developers will recognize
All endpoints live under https://realtimebets.com/api/v1 and expect the header Authorization: Bearer rtb_sk_ with your secret key. A typical in-play flow uses four calls.
- GET /api/v1/events?status=live returns live events with score and clock.
- GET /api/v1/events/{event_id}/markets returns markets with key, selections, price_decimal, probability, margin, status and locks_at.
- POST /api/v1/risk/check sends event_id, market_key, selection_key, stake, price and your customer_ref, and returns a decision with the maximum stake allowed.
- POST /api/v1/bets records the bet with your own bet_id, so it counts toward liability and settles when its market resolves. Sending the same bet_id twice records it once.
Settlement arrives as a bet.settled POST to the webhook address you set in the console. Each delivery carries an X-RTB-Signature header with a timestamp and an HMAC SHA-256 of the timestamp and the raw body, made with your endpoint secret. Your server recomputes the hash, compares it in constant time and rejects anything that does not match or is older than 5 minutes. Each delivery is tried up to 3 times and has an id, so you can ignore duplicates safely.
| Vendor | Commercial model | Self-serve | Own pricing | Risk checks | Settlement |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RealTimeBets | Published monthly or yearly plans, from $499/mo | Yes | Yes, model-based | Yes, Growth and up | Signed webhooks, every plan |
| Kambi | Revenue share turnkey | No, sales process | Yes, within the turnkey book | Within the turnkey book | Within the turnkey book |
| Sportradar or Genius Sports | Enterprise contracts | No, sales process | Trading services by contract | By contract | By contract |
| The Odds API | $30 to $249/mo | Yes | No | No | No |
What stays in your hands
Operators often worry that a sportsbook API means giving up control. Here the split is clear. RealTimeBets never holds player funds, never sees card details and never talks to your customers. Your platform owns the account, the KYC checks your regulator requires, the wallet, deposits and withdrawals.
What you configure on our side is risk policy. On Growth and Enterprise you set the liability limit per market type and the maximum stake per customer in the console, and customers flagged as sharp get half of those limits. You decide which sports and markets appear in your book by what you request, match markets, micro-markets or both. Enterprise adds roles, an audit log, SSO and an IP allow-list as plan features.
If you want us to run the front as well, the white label sportsbook on Enterprise puts a betting site on your domain, under your brand name and colour, with your wallet endpoint stored in the console. Most teams start with the API and decide later.
Going live without a sales cycle
The usual route to a sportsbook data and trading partner runs through discovery calls, a commercial proposal, legal review and a long onboarding. RealTimeBets skips the first three. Prices are on the pricing page, checkout is self-serve and the sandbox key is created in the console after you confirm your email.
Your developers can build against the sandbox while your compliance team stores the licence record. The sandbox feed runs 60 seconds behind, covers one sport and stops after 1,000 requests or 7 days, and every payload says "sandbox": true. When the licence record is on file and the plan is paid, production keys go live for real-money use.
Plans are monthly or yearly. Yearly costs half: Growth is $999 a month billed as $11,988 a year instead of $1,999 monthly. Moving up charges the difference at once, and there is no multi-year commitment to sign. Compare all three plans on the pricing page.
Compared with turnkey and data vendors
Two kinds of vendor usually come up when a book shops for a sportsbook API. Turnkey providers such as Kambi sell a complete book on revenue share through a sales process. Data houses such as Sportradar and Genius Sports sell official data and trading services on enterprise contracts. Both are proven routes, and both take time and negotiation before a single price shows on your site.
Cheap odds feeds sit at the other end. They publish prices and give keys quickly, but they do not price markets themselves, so there is nothing to suspend, risk-check or settle.
RealTimeBets sits in between: a published monthly price, an engine that prices, suspends, checks and settles, and no revenue share. The table sets out only what each vendor makes public.