📌 Platform: Fine Line
📌 Creator: Svenn Grønbeck (solo founder, product & data strategist)
📌 Industry: Sports betting & analytics
📌 Goal: Help users make smarter bets using data models, not gut feeling
📌 Challenge: Build a scalable, insight-driven platform powered by accurate football data
Fine Line launched in 2021 with a clear ambition: to offer an intelligent, user-friendly betting assistant that moves beyond intuition. The goal wasn’t just to help people place bets — it was to help them bet better. With over 15,000 users and growing, Fine Line combines real-time odds, statistical modeling, and intuitive tools to help users find value in every match.
But building a platform that calculates true odds, compares them with bookmaker data, and recommends bets in real time requires more than good design — it requires a powerful, structured data engine running underneath.
At the heart of Fine Line’s mission lies a clear ambition: to replace guesswork with logic. Betting, for many, is driven by emotions or gut feelings. Fine Line challenges this approach by empowering users to take a mathematical and data-informed route instead.
A key component of this strategy is Fine Line’s internally developed odds model, which calculates the “true” probability of match outcomes. These expected odds are then compared to bookmakers’ odds to uncover value bets, instances where the available odds are higher than the calculated probability suggests they should be.
The vision isn’t just to serve professionals. As Svenn puts it, “We want to make value betting accessible to everyone, not just seasoned bettors or analysts.”
To build Fine Line, Svenn needed more than scores and standings. He needed:
✔ Up-to-date odds across multiple bookmakers
✔ Deep player and team statistics
✔ Flexible filtering for trend analysis and modeling
✔ Data stability and coverage across global leagues
Several providers were tested, but each came with trade-offs. Some lacked full coverage, others had confusing APIs, and many failed to meet expectations in speed or support. Every delay meant time lost on features. The development cycle was constantly slowed by patching data gaps.
We tested four different APIs before we found Sportmonks. Each one fell short in a critical area — either poor documentation, unreliable uptime, or missing data.
Sportmonks stood out instantly. We got started with the trial and within hours we knew, this was the one.
When Fine Line discovered Sportmonks, the decision came quickly. The platform offered a rare combination of:
Fine Line uses a wide set of Sportmonks features, both in the front-end experience and behind-the-scenes modeling engine.
📌 Live scores & match data
📌 Team & player statistics
📌 Bookmaker odds
📌 Head-to-head history
📌 Predictions & trends
📌 Squad data
Much of the data powers the internal value model. The rest helps users interactively explore trends, compare teams, and make informed picks in real time.
Our entire model depends on comparing bookmaker odds with our calculated expected odds. That’s only possible because of the consistent and detailed data Sportmonks provides.
Since switching to Sportmonks, Fine Line has:
✅ Launched new tools like betting trends and match filters
✅ Reduced time spent fixing broken data pipelines
✅ Improved API response time and uptime reliability
✅ Increased user retention thanks to more accurate features
✅ Focused more on product, less on data firefighting
Let Sportmonks handle the football data, so you can focus on building something game-changing.
