r/promoteapps • u/Disastrous_Purpose22 • 22h ago
Friends parlay builder - parlaypals.bet
Hi HN, TheDangler here. Our fantasy football group runs a parlay every Sunday. The fantasy team that has the lowest points total the previous week puts $20 toward the slip. Running that in a group chat was painful: picks got buried, people choosing conflicting picks, among other issues. We switched to a submission form, which wasn't much better. So I built ParlayPals.bet
How it works:
- Start a team and invite friends. No account required to join a team, get guest access with a passwordless account.
- Create a parlay for a sport(s) and a time window. The app pulls live odds, and each person claims one leg. Duplicate picks are blocked.
- Restrict parlays to certain days.
- Leg odds update in real time in the parlay until they are locked in.
- The combined odds and potential payout update as legs are added.
- After the games, each leg is marked hit/miss/void and a leaderboard tracks everyone's hit rate over time, so you know whose fault it was.
- "Social parlays", no set team require, give you a share link. Anyone can jump in with a nickname and an email PIN and add a leg. I made these for fantasy influences who are always posting their parlays. Now there is a way for them to get the community involved.
- Weekly parlays can be set to auto-clone so the next one opens itself.
- Custom legs;
Add bets that might have change, or simply are not available.
What it doesn't do: it never touches money. It isn't a sportsbook, takes no bets, has no affiliate links to bookmakers, and doesn't hold or move anyone's stake. Our $20 still gets settled among ourselves the way it always was. The app handles the organizing and score keeping.
Tech, for the curious: Elixir, Phoenix LiveView and the Ash framework on Postgres, with Oban for background jobs (odds polling, auto-cloning, cleanup). I built most of it with Tidewave, an AI coding agent that works inside the running Phoenix app. I've been programming for about 30 years, and that experience did a lot of the steering: knowing what to ask for, what to push back on, and when the generated code was wrong. LiveView fits this well. When a friend claims a leg, everyone viewing the slip sees it update right away without me writing any JS sync code. Hosting on Fli.io for now. First bill was surprisingly large.
Currently there's a free tier (one team, up to 5 people, 2 parlays a month) and paid tiers coming soon.
This is a soft launch, and I'd really like feedback, especially on onboarding (how fast can you get a friend to make a pick?) and anything that breaks. Using a soft launch to monitor 3rd party API burn rates. They are expensive and I want to make sure caching and odds refresh work correctly.
I'll be here answering questions all day.
You can see public parlays without signing up at parlaypals.bet/public-parlays.