No affiliate links. Ever.
Most matched betting sites earn a referral fee every time you sign up to a bookmaker through them. BetBoffins doesn't. Here's why.
How matched betting affiliate links normally work
When a review site recommends a bookmaker, that link is usually tracked. If you sign up and deposit, the site earns a referral fee — typically £20 to £100 per new customer. That's how OddsMonkey, Outplayed, Profit Accumulator and most independent matched-betting guides pay their bills.
There are two problems with that for you, the reader.
First, the obvious one: the bookmakers paying the biggest commissions tend to get the most prominent placements, even when their offers aren't the best for the reader. The recommendations you read are filtered through who pays the site the most, not who pays you the most.
Second, the one nobody talks about: when you sign up via an affiliate link, you're tagged in the bookmaker's system as having come from that affiliate. So does every other matched better who clicked the same link. That tag makes you trivial to cluster with the rest, which makes it far easier for the bookmaker's risk team to spot and restrict your account. The paid services are quietly making your account easier to gub.
What I do differently
Every link to a bookmaker on this site is a plain link. No tracking, no referral codes, no commission. The recommendations are sorted purely by which offers extract the most profit for you.
That means a few things in practice:
- When the audit found that Sky Bet's qualifying bet dropped from £10 to 5p, that bumped Sky Bet up the list. There's no commercial incentive to keep an inferior offer in a higher slot.
- When a smaller bookmaker like Dabble has a £10 offer that's genuinely worth doing, it gets a full guide alongside the £30+ ones — not buried because the commission is smaller.
- When something I previously recommended gets worse (like Bet365's account-restriction pace), I write that down clearly rather than glossing over it.
How the site pays for itself today
For now, it doesn't. BetBoffins is built and maintained by one person (me, Luke), and it costs me a few quid a month to run on Vercel, Supabase and Resend. It's a side project that I do for fun in the evenings.
I'd like to monetise it one day — properly, so I can justify spending more time on it and build the bigger features that need real money behind them (a live oddsmatcher, in particular). When that happens it will be through something transparent: a Patreon, a one-off paid product, or a non-bookmaker sponsorship. Reader-paid, not bookmaker-paid.
What it will never include is bookmaker affiliate links. That promise stands regardless of how the site evolves.
What this means for you
You can trust the offer rankings. You can trust the warnings about which bookmakers gub fastest. You can trust that when a guide says an offer is worth doing, it's because it actually is — not because clicking the link pays for someone's mortgage.
That's the whole differentiator. Everything else on this site — the calculator, the trackers, the offer guides — is just the work.