Flamia vs a betting spreadsheet
The short answer
If you’re placing a handful of bets a month and enjoy your spreadsheet, keep it. It’s free, it’s yours, and it teaches you what data matters. The switch pays for itself when upkeep starts costing you the habit, or when you need closing line value — the one number that is genuinely impractical to maintain by hand, and the reason our paid tier exists.
What a betting spreadsheet is
A spreadsheet is the default starting point for tracking bets, and a good one. It costs nothing, adapts to any format you want, and keeps your data entirely under your control. Most serious bettors start here, and some never need anything else.
Where Flamia is different
- Closing lines captured automatically — the one column almost nobody sustains manually, and the most predictive one.
- Capture takes seconds from a screenshot instead of minutes of typing, which is what keeps the habit alive.
- No broken formulas or mistyped stakes silently corrupting months of history.
- A signed record you can share as proof, rather than a file anyone could have edited.
When a betting spreadsheet is the better choice
- You bet rarely, and the upkeep genuinely isn’t a burden.
- You want total control over the schema and enjoy building your own analysis.
- You want zero cost and zero third-party dependency — a spreadsheet answers to nobody.
Side by side
| Feature | Flamia | a betting spreadsheet |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Partial: Free ledger up to 250 bets; CLV and the deeper analytics are Pro (€37.99/mo). | Yes: Free. |
| Time per bet logged | Yes: Seconds — screenshot in, parsed fields out. | No: Minutes of manual typing, every bet. |
| Closing line captured | Yes: Automatic at commit. | No: Technically possible, almost never sustained in practice. |
| Resistant to human error | Yes: Parsed fields are verified; committed rows are immutable. | No: One dragged formula can corrupt months of data invisibly. |
| Full control over the format | Partial: Structured schema, with full export of every bet. | Yes: Total freedom — its real advantage. |
| Provable to a third party | Yes: Hash-chained and independently verifiable. | No: A spreadsheet proves nothing — anyone could have edited it. |
Comparison reflects a typical self-built tracking spreadsheet.
Frequently asked questions
- Is a spreadsheet good enough for tracking bets?
- For a while, genuinely yes, and it’s far better than not tracking at all. It stops being good enough at the point where manual entry gets skipped, or where you need closing line value — the number that tells you whether your edge is real, and the one that is realistically impossible to record by hand for every bet.
- Can I import my existing spreadsheet?
- Yes. Flamia’s import flow handles structured bet and leg data, so an existing history comes across rather than starting from zero. Where a closing line is available for the market, historical bets get scored too.
- Will I lose control of my data?
- You lose the data entry, not the data. Every bet remains visible and exportable. What changes is that the tedious parts — capture and closing lines — stop being your job.
Try it against your own history
The free ledger takes no card. Import a few slips, build some history, and add CLV scoring with Pro when you want to know whether you’re beating the close. No picks, no wagering, either way.
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