About FriendlyBet

FriendlyBet Live is an independent, non-commercial, open-source World Cup 2026 prediction pool. This page explains who builds it, why it exists, and how it can possibly be free.

What FriendlyBet is

FriendlyBet Live is a free, open-source, privacy-first World Cup 2026 prediction pool for friends, offices and tech teams — no signup, no ads, no money, no personal data. You create a private pool, invite friends with one link, and predict the entire tournament: all 12 group standings, the full official Round-of-32 knockout bracket through to the Final, and the Golden Boot top scorer. As real results arrive, scores recalculate automatically on a live leaderboard.

Who builds it

FriendlyBet is built and maintained by Eyal (GitHub: Aviatorpo), an independent developer, as a non-commercial hobby project. It is not made by a company and is not backed by advertising or investors. The entire source code is public on GitHub under the MIT license, so anyone can read exactly what the app does, contribute, or run their own copy.

Why it exists

Running a World Cup pool with friends should be fun and frictionless. In practice, most options either charge money, demand an email and a password, bury the game under ads, or quietly monetise your data. FriendlyBet was built to be the opposite: genuinely free, with nothing to sign up for and nothing to lose. The goal is bragging rights among friends and colleagues, not your attention or your inbox.

How it can be free

FriendlyBet is engineered to cost almost nothing to run, which is what makes "free forever" credible rather than a teaser. There is no application server: the browser talks directly to a Supabase database protected by Row-Level Security, live match data is served as static snapshots from a CDN, and scoring runs in scheduled free-tier CI jobs. No paid infrastructure, no ads, no paid tier — and no money is ever handled inside the app.

Not affiliated with similarly named services

FriendlyBet Live (friendlybet.live) is an independent open-source project and is not affiliated with any other similarly named commercial service, such as friendlybet.org. If you found us looking for an ad-free, open-source alternative, you are in the right place. See the detailed comparison.

Is this gambling?

No. FriendlyBet does not facilitate real-money betting. Predictions are for entertainment and bragging rights only. Any friendly side bets stay between friends, outside the app.

Get involved

The codebase is intentionally simple — framework-free static files with no build step — so the barrier to contributing is low. The single best way to support an independent, privacy-first open-source project is to star the repo on GitHub and tell a friend.

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