SharpAPI is a good product with a real point of view: it does the betting math for you. Arbitrage, +EV, middles, low hold and no-vig fair odds arrive as first-class objects instead of something you derive, and the pricing is published, self-serve and starts at a free tier with no card (sharpapi.io/pricing, read 2026-09-01). The one thing to read closely before you buy is which books each tier unlocks. ParlayAPI takes the other side of that trade: every source at every tier, including the free one.
SharpAPI is not a raw feed with a thin wrapper. Knowing which half of it you are buying is most of the decision.
Their homepage headline is “Real-Time Odds. Built-In Edge.” and the product follows it: arbitrage detection, +EV, middles, low hold and no-vig fair odds are endpoints, not exercises left to the reader. Their own summary of the pitch is that you should stop collecting, normalising and de-vigging odds by hand and let the API hand you the answer. SSE streaming is described as “Push-based updates. No polling. Connect once, receive odds forever,” and the developer story is TypeScript-first with full types.
Their pricing page is published, self-serve and priced in requests per minute: Free at $0/mo with 12 requests/min and no card, Hobby at $79/mo, Pro at $229/mo and Sharp at $399/mo, with WebSocket streaming and live game state sold as add-ons. The detail worth reading twice is that the same page scopes sportsbook access per tier while the homepage headline says over 40 books. Open both pages and confirm your books are in the tier you are pricing.
We publish this page to win business, so it starts with the case against us. Everything in this section is SharpAPI's own description of SharpAPI, read 2026-09-01 and linked in verify it yourself. If one of these paragraphs describes your project, buy from them.
Arbitrage detection, +EV, middles, low hold and no-vig fair odds ship as part of the API rather than as a formula in your codebase. That is a genuine and underrated engineering saving: devig conventions, stale-leg filtering and cross-book normalisation are the parts of an odds pipeline that quietly rot, and a vendor who owns them owns the bug reports too. If your product is a bet-finder and not a data platform, this is the shortest path to shipping (sharpapi.io, read 2026-09-01).
No sales call, no quote, no NDA: the tier names, the monthly prices and the per-minute rate limits are all on one public page, and the free tier needs no card. That is more transparency than most of this market offers, and it is the same thing we ask people to value about us. Credit where it is due (sharpapi.io/pricing, read 2026-09-01).
Every tier is sized in requests/min, from 12 on Free to 1000 on Sharp. A per-minute ceiling is far easier to design a polling loop against than a monthly credit budget, and if your traffic is steady rather than bursty it is the friendlier model. Ours is credit-metered, which is better for spiky workloads and worse for a constant 1 Hz poller (sharpapi.io/pricing, read 2026-09-01).
ParlayAPI figures are measured against our own production API and catalogue as of 2026-09 and are checkable on live public endpoints. SharpAPI figures are read from their own pages on 2026-09-01, with the URL in every row. Where SharpAPI publishes no number, the cell says so rather than guessing.
| Feature | ParlayAPI | SharpAPI |
|---|---|---|
| Getting a key | Self-serve signup, key immediately, no card. There is also a keyless demo endpoint you can call before signing up at all | Self-serve signup, free tier with no card required |
| Published pricing | Yes, at /pricing, plus a cost calculator that prices your own call pattern | Yes: Free $0/mo, Hobby $79/mo, Pro $229/mo, Sharp $399/mo |
| Book access by tier | Every source at every tier, free included. There is no plan that hides a book behind an upgrade | Sportsbook access is listed per tier on their pricing page (5 on Hobby, 15 on Pro, 25 on Sharp) while the homepage headline says over 40 books.read both pages and confirm your books are in your tier before you buy |
| Free tier terms | 1,000 credits/month, no card, full book list, no pre-match-only restriction | $0/mo, 12 requests/min, no card, and “Pre-match only: live polling requires Pro+” |
| Streaming | WebSocket and SSE on Business tier and up, no separate add-on fee - see /pricing | SSE described on the homepage; WebSocket streaming sold as a $99/mo add-on on top of a paid plan |
| Coverage | 30+ sportsbooks and sources across 90+ sport keys, live at GET /v1/sports and GET /v1/bookmakers |
Over 40 books advertised on the homepage; sports named on their pricing page as NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, NCAAF, NCAAB, MLS, UFC and major soccer, with no total league count published, read 2026-09-01 |
| Prediction markets | ✓ Kalshi and Polymarket in the same schema as sportsbooks | Not listed on their site, read 2026-09-01 |
| Historical odds | Game closing lines from 2005 and a player-prop closing-line archive | Offered, but gated: their pricing page lists historical odds as “Enterprise only” and says “historical odds endpoints are Enterprise-only”, read 2026-09-01. No archive start year is published |
| Pre-computed arbitrage, +EV, middles | Available, and the free public boards at /moves and /divergence are keyless | ✓ Arbitrage from Hobby, +EV, middles, low hold and betting splits from Pro |
| AI-agent tooling | MCP server: parlayapi-mcp on PyPI plus a hosted endpoint, documented at /mcp |
No MCP server named on the pages we cite, read 2026-09-01 |
| Independent reachability record | Published at /watch, ourselves included, probed every 5 minutes | Not currently one of the endpoints we probe, so we have no measurement to offer either way |
We do not reprint our own paid prices anywhere on this page. They live at /pricing, which is the only surface that can be right about them, and /tools/cost-calculator will estimate what your own call pattern costs before you sign up for anything.
Nothing below needs a sales call, a card or an account. That is the whole argument: you can falsify our claims in about ninety seconds, which is the only reason to believe a comparison page written by a competitor.
# keyless demo endpoint, 60 requests/hour per IP curl "https://parlay-api.com/v1/try/americanfootball_nfl/odds" # keyless public feeds, same data path as the paid API curl "https://parlay-api.com/moves.json" curl "https://parlay-api.com/divergence.json"
curl "https://parlay-api.com/v1/sports/americanfootball_nfl/odds?regions=us&markets=h2h&apiKey=YOUR_KEY"
There is an MCP server too, if your client is an AI agent rather than a script:
parlayapi-mcp on PyPI, plus a hosted endpoint documented at
/mcp. Full endpoint reference at /docs.
One more thing you can check on us rather than take on faith: /watch probes odds-API endpoints every 5 minutes from our production server and publishes the result, ParlayAPI included and measured by exactly the same rule as everyone else. SharpAPI is not currently one of the endpoints on that board, so we are not claiming anything about their uptime, good or bad.
Every SharpAPI statement on this page came from one of these pages on the date shown. Prices and coverage move; if you are making a buying decision, open them yourself rather than trusting a page published by a competitor, including this one.
| What we read | Source URL | Read date |
|---|---|---|
| Positioning, coverage, SSE and TypeScript claims | sharpapi.io/ | read 2026-09-01 |
| Tier names, monthly prices, per-minute limits, per-tier book access, add-ons | sharpapi.io/pricing | read 2026-09-01 |
| Their own roundup, which ranks SharpAPI first | sharpapi.io/compare/best-sports-betting-apis | read 2026-09-01 |
ParlayAPI's own numbers are checkable without asking us: GET /v1/sports and
GET /v1/bookmakers return the live catalogue,
/watch publishes our reachability next to other providers', and
/pricing carries current prices.
ParlayAPI does, and we compete with SharpAPI, so read it with that in mind. Every SharpAPI claim here is linked to a SharpAPI page, read 2026-09-01, and the section above the comparison table is entirely about what they do better than us. Every ParlayAPI number is checkable on a public endpoint.
It computes the edge for you. Arbitrage, +EV, middles, low hold and no-vig fair odds are shipped as API objects rather than left as maths in your codebase, which is a real saving if your product is a bet-finder. Their developer story is also TypeScript-first with full types, which we do not match, and their per-minute rate limits are easier to design a steady poller against than credits.
From sharpapi.io/pricing, read 2026-09-01: a free tier at $0/mo with 12 requests/min and no card, then Hobby at $79/mo, Pro at $229/mo and Sharp at $399/mo, sized by requests per minute, with WebSocket streaming at $99/mo and live game state at $79/mo as add-ons. Sportsbook access is scoped per tier on that same page. Prices move, so open the page yourself before deciding.
There may not be one for you. If the books you care about are inside the tier you were going to buy anyway, a cap costs you nothing. It matters if you are line shopping, because the value of line shopping comes from breadth: the outlier book you do not have access to is exactly the one holding the best number. ParlayAPI does not scope books by tier, so the free tier sees the same list the top tier does.
Call the keyless demo endpoint at /v1/try/americanfootball_nfl/odds, which allows 60 requests per hour per IP, or read the keyless public feeds /moves.json, /divergence.json and /watch.json. GET /v1/sports and GET /v1/bookmakers return the live catalogue behind the coverage claims on this page.
1,000 credits a month, no credit card, no sales call. If SharpAPI turns out to be the better fit for what you are building, you have lost nothing but an afternoon.