Index last measured 24 July 2026. Cheapest book this week: Playabets at 6.00 percent. Edges takes no bets and never holds your money. Over 18s only.

EDGES

The desk

We measure what bookmakers charge. That is the whole business.

No tips, no systems, no predictions. One number, measured properly, published every week and never quietly edited afterwards.

Why this exists

South African punters have plenty of places to read opinions about who will win. They have nowhere to find out how much they are being charged to have that opinion. The fee inside betting odds is real, it varies enormously between bookmakers, and until now nobody in this market published it.

In our latest measurement the field ran from 6.00% to 10.41%. A punter using the wrong book pays that difference on every bet, forever, without ever being told.

What we promise

  • Never a tip. We do not predict results and we will not start.
  • Never an invented number. Every figure is measured from a bookmaker's own published prices, and if we cannot measure something we say so on the page.
  • Never a quiet edit. Published tables stay published. Corrections appear next to the original, dated.
  • Never a paid ranking. Position in the index is computed from the measured margin. No bookmaker can buy a better place.
  • Never a hidden omission. Books we cannot read are listed with the reason, including the ones that told us to stay away.

How the money works

We earn affiliate commission when a reader opens an account through one of our links. That is the entire revenue model and we would rather state it plainly than bury it. The conflict it creates is obvious, so the defence is built into the product: the rankings come from arithmetic anyone can repeat, we publish books we have no relationship with, and any book that undercuts a partner ranks above it. Full disclosure →

How we treat the bookmakers

We read only public pages, never log in, never accept a cookie we do not need, and never work around a bot challenge. When a bookmaker's own rules say do not read a page, we do not read it, and we print that on the bookmakers page rather than pretending they were never in the running. Our collector identifies itself by name and can be blocked by anyone who wants to block it.

Who this is for

Anyone who bets in South Africa and would rather not overpay. You do not need to understand probability theory. You need one number per bookmaker, updated weekly, and the confidence that it was measured rather than invented. The method is public →

Straight answers

About the desk

Who is behind Edges?
Edges is published by a small independent desk based in South Africa. Editorial output is written under The Edges Desk name rather than a personal byline, because the numbers are produced by a documented process rather than by an individual's opinion. We do not invent personas or fake credentials.
How does Edges make money?
Affiliate commission. If you follow a link to a bookmaker and open an account, that bookmaker may pay us. It costs you nothing extra. Crucially, the rankings are computed from measured prices, so a book cannot buy a better position, and we publish books we earn nothing from.
Are you licensed as a bookmaker?
No, and we never will be. Edges accepts no bets, holds no customer money, and operates no gambling product. We are a publisher that measures prices. All the operators we cover hold their own provincial licences.
Can I use your data?
Yes, with attribution and a link. Our numbers are published so they can be checked and quoted. If you are a journalist or researcher who needs the underlying snapshot, ask and we will share it.

Reach the desk

Contact

One address, read by a person. Corrections take priority over everything else: if a number here does not match what you see at the bookmaker, send the screenshot and we publish the correction beside the original figure.

[email protected]

We hold no contact form, because a form needs a database and this site deliberately has none. Nothing you send is added to a mailing list, and there is no mailing list to add it to.

Corrections

A disputed number is checked against the stored snapshot for that week and answered either way. How the numbers are made →

Researchers and bookmakers

Every edition is generated from a stored snapshot of the prices we read. Ask and we will share the file for the week in question.

Data requests under POPIA

Send them to the same address. The answer will almost always be that we hold nothing about you, because the site sets no cookies and runs no analytics. What we do and do not collect →