Polling is a guess
A poll either fires when nothing changed or sits too long while prices moved. The WebSocket pushes when the book moves — a burst during action, quiet when idle. Quiet is information too.
Same source, very different work. Here is what each route actually costs you to build and keep running.
| FanLine Wire | Poll the sportsbook yourself | One-shot scraping | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Transport | Push WebSocket + REST discovery | Polling loop you own | Ad-hoc scripts |
| Update model | Event-driven pushes | Fixed interval, wasted calls | Whenever you re-run it |
| Markets | Moneyline, spread, totals | Whatever you can parse | Whatever survives markup changes |
| Odds formats | American + decimal | Parse it yourself | Parse it yourself |
| Market status signal | OPEN ↔ SUSPENDED flips live | You infer it from changes | You miss it |
| Runner detail | selectionId, handicap, runner status | Rebuild it from pages | Not stable |
| Maintenance | Ours | Yours, forever | Breaks without warning |
A poll either fires when nothing changed or sits too long while prices moved. The WebSocket pushes when the book moves — a burst during action, quiet when idle. Quiet is information too.
Markets flip OPEN ↔ SUSPENDED as the book pauses and reopens. On a poll you reconstruct this; on the feed it arrives as a field.
Front-end markup is not an API. Every redesign breaks it, and nothing tells you when it broke. A structured payload with stable runner fields does not have that failure mode.
"Observed on the live reference feed" describes the transport and fields measured in our 90-market reference run — see the docs. Nothing on this page is a performance guarantee.
If you'd rather buy FanDuel prices than build a polling rig, these are the shapes on the market. Full write-ups: vs The Odds API · vs Betstamp.
| FanLine Wire | The Odds API | SportsGameOdds | Betstamp API | OddsPapi | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FanDuel depth | Dedicated — the whole product | 1 of many books | 1 of many books | 1 of 200+ books | 1 of 350+ books |
| Delivery | Push WebSocket + REST | REST polling at last check | REST + WebSocket streams | REST + SSE at last check | REST at last check |
| Free tier | Yes, no card | 500 credits/mo | 2.5k objects/mo | Demo request | 250 req/mo |
| Paid entry | $29/mo at launch | $30/mo (20K credits) | ~$99/mo (Rookie) | Quote-based | Usage-based |
| Billing shape | Flat-rate, pushes uncounted | Credits per request | Per event object | Quote | Usage |
| Free test, no signup | Yes — public snapshot | No | No | No | Partial |
Competitor pricing and terms last verified 2026-09-10 from their public pricing pages — always re-check before buying. Corrections: hello@fanlinewire.com.