Warning: Transaction charge

[chaser]

How many of you have asked Betfair for a breakdown of your usage data ?
I have just received mine and find that on one day in the last two weeks I would have incurred a charge of £18!! - as far as I recollect it was a normal afternoon using Betting Assistant and the only thing I can put it down to, is having several market tabs open, refreshing at 0.2.
Perhaps we can put together a 'best practise' for using Betting Assistant.

Methodman's idea of only switching to a faster refresh in-running is a good suggestion.
Limiting the number of open markets is another.
Any other suggestions ?
Chaser

[MarkRussell]

Hi,

The next release of Betting Assistant will clearly display how many requests per second that you are making.
And there will be an option in preferences to throttle the requests.
But it is a good idea to think about whether you really need the very fast refresh rates as nobody wants to incurr unnecessary charges.

Cheers,
Mark

[GaryRussell]

Version 1.1.0.0 Beta has been released today which displays the number of requests and also allows you to throttle the requests by changing your preferences. Please note throttled requests are not discarded they just wait until it is possible to send the request without going over the throttle limit.

Any feed back, good or bad will be appreciated.

[methodman]

Hi Gary

Just installed new version and checked throttle set at 20 - however count goes above twenty - have seen it hit 32 - should it stop at twenty or not ????

[GaryRussell]

Is throttle definitely ticked?

[methodman]

Hi Gary - oops! sorry about that checked the count but not the check box.

[GaryRussell]

Phew, you had me worried, this absolutely must not fail

[Castillo]

We will be releasing an update which will track your requests, display the count and provide the option to throttle all requests to 20 per second to avoid this charge. We will also include the transaction counting facility in this release.

Gary / Mark

Thanks for the update and the additional Excel trigger.

One question, on each hour 6:00pm, 7:00pm, 8:00pm etc should the transaction counter reset to zero to initiate a new count? It's now 7:10pm and the count still exists from the previous hour.

Cheers
Castillo

[Castillo]

Would it be useful to see some kind of colour indication if the transaction requests equalled or exceeded 21 per second? At the moment you need to watch closely if it’s hovering around the 20 mark as it changes quite fast.

Perhaps changing the Requests: 21 to Requests: 21

Cheers
Castillo

[laffo16]

thank you very much for this feature, it must have a mission to code and i much appreciate the work you have put into making it. This first thing i did was open up a few markets and a little reluctantly push the throttle to its limit, no problems i found so a job well done! perhaps in the future could this 20 figure be ajustable for id rather have it set on 18 just to be safe

i noticed the ladder seems to call a few more requests then the normal interface just so you all know. thanks again admin, good job!

[Castillo]

perhaps in the future could this 20 figure be ajustable for id rather have it set on 18 just to be safe

Hi Laffo

You can adjust the throttle value in Preferences and also you can untick the box to turn it off.

Cheers
Castillo

[Castillo]

It would be good to see in the main screen of BA that Throttle requests is enabled and the value which is set at.
Perhaps a green tick with the value, similar to how it is shown with the Tick Offset & Stop Loss & if not enabled a red cross.

[PeteB]

A transaction is counted as anything that produces a new bet reference so cancelling a bet does not count.

Sorry to drag this one up again - Gary can you please confirm where this info comes from, as I can't find anything on the betfair site, beyond this sentence on the charges page:

At the end of every day, we add up all the bets you placed or edited (whether matched, cancelled or lapsed). If this number is in excess of 1000 in any hour of the day then:

I'm working on something that will generate a lot of bets, and need to know whether moving a bet (stakes remain the same) will result in a transaction charge.
(I'm clear that increasing stakes is a new transaction)

Cheers,

Pete.

[GaryRussell]

Every new bet reference is treated as a transaction. We got this information from the API support team.

[PeteB]

Great - thanks Gary - that's good to know - it makes a few things easier if we can move bets!