An OddsJam Alternative Where the Math Is Free and Open

By Alex Thornton · author of the MIT-licensed teachersbettextbook library · Last reviewed 24 July 2026

Betting-software comparisons are frequently monetised through affiliate programs: OddsJam’s own affiliate page offers a “50% lifetime share per member you refer” with “no caps” (read 24 July 2026). This page carries no such link, says up front that it is written by a competitor, and sources every claim about anyone else to their own page.

Teacher’s Bet is a free sports-betting analytics calculator that de-vigs posted prices, computes expected value, sizes stakes by the Kelly criterion, splits arbitrage stakes and prices prediction-market fees — printing the full derivation and a timestamp beside every number. It is not a sportsbook: it accepts no wagers, holds no funds and issues no picks.

What people are usually after when they search this

Four distinct problems get typed into the same search box, and they have different answers.

1. The price. Full-featured scanners are priced for people running serious volume. If the subscription is a real fraction of the bankroll, the arithmetic in the next section is the whole decision, and it is arithmetic anyone can do in ten seconds.
2. “Is there a free one?” Usually yes for the math and no for the scanning. Those are different products with different costs. De-vig, EV, Kelly, arbitrage and CLV are closed-form arithmetic that costs nothing to run; watching forty books at once costs real money in data licensing every month.
3. The black box. A tool prints “+3.1% EV” and there is no way to see where that came from. Every number here has a “show the work” path, and the underlying functions are on PyPI under an MIT licence, so the arithmetic can be reproduced offline in four lines of Python.
4. Limits. Winning accounts at retail sportsbooks get restricted, which is a property of the book, not of the tool. It is the reason this site’s fair-value work points at exchange order books, where the venue is not the counterparty. That is covered in books vs. exchanges.

What a subscription has to earn back

Before comparing feature lists, there is one calculation that decides most of it. A subscription is a fixed annual cost; profit from betting is a rate on money staked. Setting them equal gives the turnover a subscription costs, in dollars staked per year:

where:

• $H$ — total amount staked over a year, in dollars (handle).
• $S$ — the subscription price per month, in dollars.
• $r$ — return on turnover: profit per dollar staked, as a decimal. A 2% return is $r = 0.02$.

Run it across the range of prices this category charges, at three rates of return:

Two things this table is not. It is not a claim that any tool produces a 1%, 2% or 3% return — that number is an input you supply, and nobody can hand it to you honestly. And it is not advice about what to subscribe to. It is division, and the point of printing it is that the roundups competing for this search never do.

What is free here, permanently

Not a trial, not a freemium ladder, not a card on file. The free tier below is the whole math stack and it stays free whether or not anyone ever subscribes, because gating the arithmetic would gate the one thing that makes the site checkable.

Nothing above needs a signup. Start with the expected value calculator →

What the paid tier is, and what it is not

The paid tier is Dean’s List, at $39 a month or $390 a year — the annual price is twelve months minus two, and the pricing page shows that subtraction. The first hundred subscribers pay $25 a month for their first twelve months, after which the standard $39 applies. That is a twelve-month discount with an end date, not a lifetime price lock; there is no lifetime plan on this site and there will not be one. A second tier, Valedictorian, is named but not priced. Checkout is not open yet.

What the money will buy is speed on live market data and depth of stored history — streamed exchange fair value, flags the moment a book’s price crosses that live fair line, and closing-line grading on everything logged. None of those three is shipped: the streamed exchange feed is built and tested but disabled in production, and closing-line history is stored in the browser rather than on a server today. It will not buy a formula the free tier lacks, and it will not buy picks. Once checkout opens, subscriptions renew until cancelled; the cancel path is one click from the account menu into the Stripe billing portal, where the subscription is cancelled — no email, no phone call and no retention step.

What OddsJam publishes about itself

Facts from OddsJam’s own public pages, read on 24 July 2026. Their pages are the authority; these links go straight to them.

• The Global package page lists the plan at $399.99/month, shown alongside a regular price of $499/month, with “Save 15%” on yearly billing and a 7-day free trial. Listed features on that page: Positive EV, Arbitrage Tool, Promo Optimizer Suite and Parlay Builder, plus one-on-one coaching sessions with a customer success team. On coverage, that page describes “hundreds of sportsbooks” analysed for positive-EV bets and invites betting on “sports from around the globe”; the phrase “hundreds of global sportsbooks” is not on the page and is not quoted here.
• Other package prices sit behind oddsjam.com/subscribe, which did not render its prices to a plain HTTP fetch on the date above, so no figure for those tiers is quoted here.
• OddsJam publishes free public calculators — no-vig fair odds, expected value, implied probability, vig — alongside a library of free education articles.
• On its page explaining the Positive EV tool, the fair line is described as “the odds that OddsJam calculates to be the ‘true line’ of the market”. That page does not name the venues the benchmark is built from. This is a statement about what that page contains, not about whether the method is any good.
• OddsJam runs an affiliate program paying, in its own words, a “50% lifetime share per member you refer”, paid monthly with “no caps”.

That last one is the most useful fact on this page, and it is not a criticism — it is a normal and openly published program. It is simply an incentive worth being able to see. A roundup earning a continuing share of every subscription it sends has a financial stake in its own ordering, and from the page itself a reader usually cannot tell whether one exists. Teacher’s Bet takes no such payments, which removes that particular incentive and replaces it with a different one: this page is written by a competitor. Both are worth knowing, and neither is visible unless somebody writes it down.

What OddsJam does that this does not

The honest half. Each item below is something a larger tool publishes and this one does not, and the arithmetic on this site is free either way.

1. Coverage. Their Global package page describes hundreds of sportsbooks analysed for positive-EV bets, across sports from around the globe. Teacher’s Bet reads a small number of first-party licensed feeds and covers a narrow slate. It is not a line-shopping service across forty books, and no amount of good math substitutes for prices you cannot see.
2. Breadth of markets. The whole math stack here is two-outcome: moneylines and binary contracts. Player props, alternate lines, same-game correlations and futures are outside what is built.
3. Adjacent tools. Promo optimisation and algorithmic bet-slip construction are named features on their page. Neither exists here, and the closest thing — the free bet converter — prices a single token rather than optimising a promo calendar.
4. A company behind it. They list one-on-one coaching with a customer success team. This is one person in Syracuse. Support is an email address, answered by the person who wrote the code.
5. A product you can buy today. Their subscription works right now and includes a 7-day trial. The paid tier here is priced but not purchasable, and the live exchange feed it depends on is still being built. That is a real gap, and pretending otherwise on a comparison page would make the rest of it worthless.
6. Track record. OddsJam has a long public trail of third-party writeups and user reviews to read before paying. Teacher’s Bet went live in July 2026 and has none. That asymmetry cuts against this page, not for it — which is why everything here is written to be checked rather than believed.

The one question worth asking either way

Every “+EV” number any tool prints — theirs, this one’s, anyone’s — is a subtraction between the price you found and a fair line the tool chose to trust. Change the fair line by a point and a half and the same posted price flips from positive to negative. That single question decides more than every feature list combined, and it has a page of its own: what to ask a +EV tool about its benchmark. How this site answers it is written out in full on the methodology page, down to the weighting formula, its constants, and a list of which steps are not yet running.

pip install teachersbettextbook

>>> from teachersbettextbook.devig import devig, prob_to_moneyline
>>> devig(-180, 155, 'proportional')
(0.6211096075778079, 0.37889039242219213)
>>> prob_to_moneyline(0.6211096075778079)
-163.92857142857144

Or start with the course: nine free lessons, in order →