We got here by failing at the obvious thing first

Touch Line Bets started as an attempt to predict football results. That attempt was thorough and it failed. Around seventy hypotheses were tested across 39,621 fixtures, 18 leagues and 13 seasons of results and closing prices, with proper chronological train and test splits. Nothing survived out of sample.

One thing did survive: prices at softer bookmakers that had drifted out of line with the market carried +4.89% closing line value across 1,089 pre-registered samples. Not a prediction. Line shopping. The unglamorous finding that the price you take matters more than the opinion you hold.

So this is a product about prices. It shows what every UK bookmaker is quoting, what those prices have done, and whether the ones you took were any good. It has no opinion about who will win, because the research says we are not entitled to one.

Who it is for

Someone who bets on football regularly, has an account with more than one bookmaker, and would like to know whether they are actually any good at it. Not professionals running arbitrage operations: BetBurger and RebelBetting serve them better and we say so on their comparison pages.

What we refuse to do

• No tips or selections. Not in any tier, not in a newsletter, not on social media.
• No affiliate money. No bookmaker pays us for placement, clicks or sign-ups. It is the only way “best price” can mean best price.
• No profit claims. We will not tell you Touch Line Bets makes you money, because we cannot know that and it would not be true for most people.
• No hidden method. Every calculation is on the methodology page, including the ones that failed.
• No dark patterns in billing. The most common complaint about the largest competitor in this category is charges continuing after cancellation. That is a low bar and we intend to clear it.

What it costs, and why

Nothing. Every price, every fixture, the movement, the calculators and a bet record with no limit on it. No account, no card, no tier above this one.

That is not a launch promotion and it is not generosity. There are three reasons, and the first is the honest one:

• The thing worth charging for does not work yet. The paid feature was always going to be automatic kick-off prices on your logged bets, and that depends on the price archive. The archive started this week. Charging for it now would be selling something that does not exist.
• Price is not what is stopping anyone using this. The site is new and nobody has heard of it. A paywall would protect revenue that does not exist while adding friction to the only thing that matters, which is whether these pages are any use to anyone.
• Taking money brings obligations we have not met. There are open questions about licensing and about the terms under which historical prices can be stored and shown. Until those are answered in writing, not charging is the straightforward way to stay on the right side of them.

It says free while the archive builds rather than free forever, because free forever is a promise that is expensive to break and we would rather not make one we might not keep. If that ever changes it will be said plainly, in advance, and nothing you have already recorded will be taken away or locked behind anything.

The honest position on gambling

Most people who bet lose money, and better prices do not change that for most people. The Gambling Commission found that 4.31% of active betting accounts carry commercial restrictions, and that nearly half of restricted accounts are in profit: bookmakers restrict customers who win. A tool that genuinely helps you win will, if it works, eventually cost you the ability to use it.

We would rather say that on the About page than discover you worked it out later. If betting has stopped being entertainment for you, the responsible gambling page lists the organisations that can help.