Warning: Transaction charge

[Turnup4thebooks]

You only get charged this if the amount EXCEEDS the commission for that day.

So for example, if you place 2500 transactions via the API betwen 14:00 & 15:00 but no more than 1000 in any other single hour during the day, then you could end up paying 1p * (2500 -1000) = £15.00. But if at the end of the day you've paid £15 or more in commission then you won't pay any transactional charge.

So you don't necessarily need to limit yourself to 1000 per hour if you know you're likely to be paying commission that day (and if you're placing that many bets you're going to be paying commission aren't you? - unless you've had a really bad day )

[Captain Sensible]

Turnup4thebooks, I'd won over £300+ on the day and ended up paying them an extra £9. When you're trading you don't pay alot of commission as you don't turnover the winners and losers. I'd tracked it down to one of the meetings that was running late and my bot was firing and cancelling BSP bets.

You won't know if you've paid transaction charges as they don't inform you, just debit your account. If you're laying fields of 30 every bet transaction is 30 , if some of them are under £2 BA will submit 3 transactions, doesn't take long on a busy saturday to rack over 1000 an hour

[Captain Sensible]

Just been sent the breakdown

When you place a bet array of 10 bets in one placeBets request, this is counted as 10 transactions as opposed to one. This is a record of the particular bets placed:-



1 23/02/2008 14:00 748



2 23/02/2008 15:00 1672



3 23/02/2008 16:00 2197



4 23/02/2008 17:00 1541

[Ian]

Betfair Customer Services 27 Feb 17:26

Important information for customers who use applications to make high numbers of data refreshes/requests.

On Monday the 14th of April Betfair will be introducing a charging deterrent aimed at limiting unnecessary API and Web data requests. Only a small number of customers will be affected by this and we expect that most will be able to use data more efficiently, thereby avoiding any charges. Anyone making more than 20 data requests in a second will be charged 0.1p per data request. Any charge will be offset by both commission and implied commission (equivalent calculation to commission but in relation to losses). We believe that high levels of data requests are sometimes unnecessary and the purpose of the charge is to align Betfair’s expenditure on data processing more closely with the betting needs of our customers.

Full details of the charge may be found on the Betfair Charges webpage which is in the About Us section of the Betfair website. If you have questions, please email datausage@betfair.com.

[GaryRussell]

We are aware of this development and will be releasing an update which will track your requests, display the count and provide the option to throttle all requests to 20 per second to avoid this charge. We will also include the transaction counting facility in this release.

[Captain Sensible]

I can see this affecting lots of BA users especially if your refresh is set to 0.1 which I guess most users will do.

Not sure how many requests BA is doing but I imagine even one market may cause you to go over if BA is calling GetMUBets and GetMarketPrices requests on each refresh and you have the same market open in a browser. Might not seem much at 0.1p a request ut considering thats every second you'll soon rack it up over a hour on a busy saturday monitoring a few markets.

[Castillo]

Not MORE charges...

If you bet below the £2 min (3 transactions ber bet) you need to make less than 6 bets per minute not to exceed 1000 bets per hour.

Cheers
Castillo

[Dai_Young]

Still trying to get my head round these new charges I must admit.

One question I have is does the number of runners in a particular market effect the number of requests BA makes? Does, say, a dog race make fewer request per second than a golf tournament market?

The transaction charges are already unfair to golf market bettors (because of the large fields and sunday only commission payments). Seems like these additional charges could really make it tough going.

[Muscolo Rosso]

We are aware of this development and will be releasing an update which will track your requests, display the count and provide the option to throttle all requests to 20 per second to avoid this charge. We will also include the transaction counting facility in this release.

Gary how many requests does BA do on each request?

[Muscolo Rosso]

We are aware of this development and will be releasing an update which will track your requests, display the count and provide the option to throttle all requests to 20 per second to avoid this charge. We will also include the transaction counting facility in this release.

Gary how many requests does BA do on each request?

Ops i meant "how many requests does BA do on each refresh?"

[pugs]

Well i think thats me finished, unless i have totally misunderstood this new charge. Would anyone be so kind to confirm or deny my fears.....

1)
I have one BA open with all of today’s racing in tabs on a 2 second refresh. The 2 second refresh is important for me to know when a non runner has been removed, but even if this was 30 seconds, would all of the markets in tabs refresh simultaneously? Pushing me way over the 20 requests per second?

2)
I have a second BA open with all racing markets in quick pick which i use for general betting, greening up, in-running, and to navigate to other Betfair markets i’m interested in. This BA is on a 0.5 second refresh. Would a counter work with 2 BA’s open?

3)
At any given time i may have 100+(maybe even 300+) matched/unmatched bets. When BA refreshes these will they count as 100+ requests? And if so, and BA throttles them, does that mean it’s possible that i may not see a matched bet till after the race has finished?

4)
And slightly off topic, i know nothing about creating macro’s or spreadsheets so i bought an Excel programme where i just have to fill in the blank spaces. This programme submits, cancels, re-submits, as and when selections fall in and out of my criteria, plus obviously refreshing all my matched/unmatched bets. This programme places about 90% of all my bets and refreshes markets/repeats triggers on average about once every 10 minutes, it monitors all uk racing markets..........

Does Excel send all requests simultaneously?.....
Would a BA throttle (if i were using BA/Excel) keep my Excel betting within Betfars allowance?.....
If it can what sort of price are we talking for a spreadsheet?


I also still use native interface to manage bets, how would you keep track of this usage?

I think my Betfair days may have come to an end, but if anyone has a glimmer of hope and has any answers to any of the questions above, it will be most appreciated

[GaryRussell]

We are aware of this development and will be releasing an update which will track your requests, display the count and provide the option to throttle all requests to 20 per second to avoid this charge. We will also include the transaction counting facility in this release.

Gary how many requests does BA do on each request?

Ops i meant "how many requests does BA do on each refresh?"

Standard interface: 2 requests (prices and bets)

Ladder interface: 2 + 2 per ladder (ie. 3 ladders = 8, 2 ladders=6)
(The 2 additional requests are traded volume and market depth. There is a new call which includes market depth in the prices so we will be reducing it to 5 requests with 3 ladders, you can also turn off traded volume so it's only 2 requests as per the standard interface)

[GaryRussell]

Well i think thats me finished, unless i have totally misunderstood this new charge. Would anyone be so kind to confirm or deny my fears.....

1)
I have one BA open with all of today’s racing in tabs on a 2 second refresh. The 2 second refresh is important for me to know when a non runner has been removed, but even if this was 30 seconds, would all of the markets in tabs refresh simultaneously? Pushing me way over the 20 requests per second?

2)
I have a second BA open with all racing markets in quick pick which i use for general betting, greening up, in-running, and to navigate to other Betfair markets i’m interested in. This BA is on a 0.5 second refresh. Would a counter work with 2 BA’s open?

3)
At any given time i may have 100+(maybe even 300+) matched/unmatched bets. When BA refreshes these will they count as 100+ requests? And if so, and BA throttles them, does that mean it’s possible that i may not see a matched bet till after the race has finished?

4)
And slightly off topic, i know nothing about creating macro’s or spreadsheets so i bought an Excel programme where i just have to fill in the blank spaces. This programme submits, cancels, re-submits, as and when selections fall in and out of my criteria, plus obviously refreshing all my matched/unmatched bets. This programme places about 90% of all my bets and refreshes markets/repeats triggers on average about once every 10 minutes, it monitors all uk racing markets..........

Does Excel send all requests simultaneously?.....
Would a BA throttle (if i were using BA/Excel) keep my Excel betting within Betfars allowance?.....
If it can what sort of price are we talking for a spreadsheet?


I also still use native interface to manage bets, how would you keep track of this usage?

I think my Betfair days may have come to an end, but if anyone has a glimmer of hope and has any answers to any of the questions above, it will be most appreciated

1) I have one BA open with all of today’s racing in tabs on a 2 second refresh. The 2 second refresh is important for me to know when a non runner has been removed, but even if this was 30 seconds, would all of the markets in tabs refresh simultaneously? Pushing me way over the 20 requests per second?
No, the throttling will not allow this, they will wait their turn. On 30 second refresh you would not see any difference, 30 seconds is enough time to refresh 300 markets (think of it as 10 markets per second)

2) I have a second BA open with all racing markets in quick pick which i use for general betting, greening up, in-running, and to navigate to other Betfair markets i’m interested in. This BA is on a 0.5 second refresh. Would a counter work with 2 BA’s open?
No, it only works with one application, couldn't you just open another tab for this?

3) At any given time i may have 100+(maybe even 300+) matched/unmatched bets. When BA refreshes these will they count as 100+ requests? And if so, and BA throttles them, does that mean it’s possible that i may not see a matched bet till after the race has finished?
It takes 1 request to refresh up to 1000 bets, this is not going to be a problem.

4) And slightly off topic, i know nothing about creating macro’s or spreadsheets so i bought an Excel programme where i just have to fill in the blank spaces. This programme submits, cancels, re-submits, as and when selections fall in and out of my criteria, plus obviously refreshing all my matched/unmatched bets. This programme places about 90% of all my bets and refreshes markets/repeats triggers on average about once every 10 minutes, it monitors all uk racing markets..........
Does Excel send all requests simultaneously?.....
Would a BA throttle (if i were using BA/Excel) keep my Excel betting within Betfars allowance?.....
If it can what sort of price are we talking for a spreadsheet?
All requests from Excel to BA are to place bets, they are not subject to the 20 transactions per second limit, they are subject to the 1000 bets per hour limit.
BA refreshes the bets and prices and copies them to Excel and these requests will be subjected to throttling so you can be sure this spreadsheet will not cause problems.

I also still use native interface to manage bets, how would you keep track of this usage?
This will not be be tracked, the new bets manager for BA is nearly complete, you shouldn't need the website.

[Muscolo Rosso]

Ladder interface: 2 + 2 per ladder (ie. 3 ladders = 8, 2 ladders=6)
(The 2 additional requests are traded volume and market depth. There is a new call which includes market depth in the prices so we will be reducing it to 5 requests with 3 ladders, you can also turn off traded volume so it's only 2 requests as per the standard interface)

So if I have
a tab opened
200ms refresh rate
3 ladders
market depth and traded volume options enabled
BA does 5 requests
5*(1000ms/200ms)=25 requests per second!!! (correct me if i am wrong) And just with a tab opened!!! Betfair, this f***** charge will finally turn against you!!

[GaryRussell]

Ladder interface: 2 + 2 per ladder (ie. 3 ladders = 8, 2 ladders=6)
(The 2 additional requests are traded volume and market depth. There is a new call which includes market depth in the prices so we will be reducing it to 5 requests with 3 ladders, you can also turn off traded volume so it's only 2 requests as per the standard interface)

So if I have
a tab opened
200ms refresh rate
3 ladders
market depth and traded volume options enabled
BA does 5 requests
5*(1000ms/200ms)=25 requests per second!!! (correct me if i am wrong) And just with a tab opened!!! Betfair, this f***** charge will finally turn against you!!

You are correct.