How many sportsbooks are actually independent?
Comparison sites advertise the number of bookmakers they cover. That number counts brands. It does not count the number of places a price is actually decided — and those two figures are much further apart than the marketing suggests.
Five platforms, fifty-four brands
Most sportsbooks do not build their own sportsbook. They licence one and put their brand on it. The betting interface, the market list, the odds feed and frequently the prices themselves come from the platform, not from the brand you signed up with.
| Platform | Brands | Who |
|---|---|---|
| Betby | 20 | 500-casino, bcgame, bet25, betfury, bitz, coincasino, cryptorino, flush, housebets, lucky-block, mega-dice, qzino, rakebit, rollbit, roobet, spin-io, thrill, trustdice, wager, winna |
| Kambi | 15 | 888sport, atg, bet-uk, betmgm-uk, comeon, expekt, leovegas, paf, unibet (+ its be/de/dk/nl/ro/se editions) |
| 1x stack | 12 | 1xbet, 1xbit, 22bet, betandyou, betwinner, coinplay, fan-sport, helabet, linebet, megapari, melbet, paripesa |
| googleserv | 4 | casinok, freshbet, jackbit, velobet |
| erisgaming | 3 | betturkey, matadorbet, sahabet |
| Independent / unclassified | 27 | the rest, including the larger operators that do run their own book |
81 active books · platform identified by fingerprinting each book's own feed
Why this matters more than it sounds
Comparing prices across books only tells you something when the books disagree, and two brands running the same platform generally do not disagree. Seven of the Betby brands in our data returned the same 90 distinct markets and between 5,692 and 5,694 individual prices in the same period. That is not a coincidence; it is one feed with seven logos on it.
The dangerous case is not when they agree — it is when they disagree slightly. Two brands on one platform can drift apart for a moment through caching or a stale edge node, and that looks exactly like a genuine price difference. It is not one. There is no disagreement between two businesses to exploit, because there is only one business.
This is why every price difference we publish is checked for shared platform before it is shown, and why those checks fired on 376 of the 3,326 opportunities in our measured edge distribution. Roughly one in nine.
So what is the honest number?
Twenty-seven books we could not tie to a shared platform, plus one genuinely distinct feed per platform, gives at most about 32 independent price sources from 81 brands.
"At most", because that figure is generous in our favour: some of the 27 unclassified books are likely to share software we have not fingerprinted yet, and some platform brands do adjust prices locally, which makes them partly independent. The true number is somewhere below 32 and above the five platforms.
The practical version: when a comparison service advertises a bookmaker count, it is advertising brands. Ask how many independent price sources that represents. It is a smaller number, and it is the one that determines whether a comparison can find anything.
We hold ourselves to that too. Our own product describes its coverage in brands, because that is what you see when you go to place a bet — but the number that governs how often a real price difference appears is the one above, and it is smaller.
How the platform is identified
Not from marketing material, which rarely mentions it. Each book is fingerprinted from its own front end while its adapter is built: the shape of the price feed, the endpoint conventions, the market identifiers, the bootstrap scripts the site loads, and the identifier formats used for fixtures and outcomes. Platforms are highly consistent across their tenants, which is what makes them licensable — and also what makes them recognisable.
Full detail on collection and checks is in the methodology.
Limitations
- 27 books are unclassified, not confirmed independent. Absence of a fingerprint is absence of evidence.
- Platform tenants are not always identical. Some operators adjust margins or limits on top of the platform feed, so "same platform" is a strong prior, not proof that two prices are the same price.
- This is our book list. It is weighted toward crypto and no-KYC operators, where white-labelling is especially common. A list of large regulated books would cluster differently.
- Ownership is a separate question. Sharing a platform does not mean sharing an owner, and separate owners can still run the same software. We measured the software.