Cost to Build an App Like DraftKings: Sportsbook and DFS Build Guide

You use DraftKings. Maybe you run a regional casino, a media brand with a large registered audience, or an international sportsbook eyeing a US state. You look at the app and think: this is a bet slip, a wallet, and a scoreboard. How expensive can it be?

The app is the cheap part.

A DraftKings-style product is three businesses wearing one interface. Daily fantasy sports (DFS). A real-money sportsbook. An online casino. Each sits in a different regulatory tier, needs a different set of vendors, and carries a different cost curve. The founders who get burned are the ones who scope "an app like DraftKings" as a single build and discover, four months in, that the software was never the line item that mattered.

This guide breaks down what each layer actually costs, why licensing and compliance dwarf the engineering bill, and how to decide whether to build custom or rent a turnkey platform.

How much does it cost to build an app like DraftKings?

Here is what operators actually pay for the software, by product type:

Those numbers are the build. They are not the business.

The larger costs sit outside engineering. Each US state licenses operators separately, and you generally need market access through a licensed casino or tribal partner before you can apply. Gaming taxes are steep: New York taxes online sports betting revenue at 51%, the highest in the country. And acquiring a paying bettor costs between $250 and $750 in a mature market, according to industry benchmarks. Before you write a line of code, the compliance and go-to-market bill often exceeds the software quote.

That is the single most important thing to understand about this category. The app is 20-30% of what it takes to operate a real-money betting product. Budget as if the software is the down payment, not the purchase.

The market you are entering

Legal US sports betting is large and still growing. Americans wagered $166.94 billion on sports in 2025, and operators kept a record $16.96 billion in revenue, up 22.6% year over year, according to the American Gaming Association. More than 30 states plus Washington, D.C. have legalized some form of sports betting.

The category leader shows the scale of a mature operator. DraftKings reported $4.77 billion in revenue for fiscal 2024 and averaged 4.8 million monthly unique payers in the fourth quarter, per its year-end results. That is the incumbent you are not trying to beat head-on. You are trying to own a niche, a region, or an audience the incumbents serve generically.

How does DraftKings make money, and what are your options?

A betting business earns in ways that look nothing like a subscription app. Understanding the model tells you which product to build first.

Sportsbook hold. The sportsbook keeps a percentage of everything wagered, called the hold. Across the US market in 2025, operators held roughly 10% of handle. On paper that is a strong margin. In practice, promotions, free bets, and boosted odds cut deeply into it, especially when acquiring new players.

DFS entry rake. Daily fantasy takes a cut of contest entry fees, typically 10-15%. There is no odds risk. You are running a pari-mutuel pool, not a book, which is why DFS is both cheaper to build and lighter to regulate.

Casino gross gaming revenue. Where legal, online casino (iGaming) is the highest-margin layer and often out-earns the sportsbook. It also carries the heaviest licensing burden.

The promotional trap. New operators lose money on purpose to buy market share. DraftKings reported average revenue per monthly payer of around $97 in Q4 2024, while online sportsbook acquisition costs run $250-$750 per funded player. That gap is why the sustainable question is never "can I take bets" but "can I keep a bettor long enough to earn back what I paid to acquire them." Your loyalty, retention, and CRM layer is not a nice-to-have. It is the business.

The forward-looking operators are already widening the model. DraftKings has moved into prediction markets, with CEO Jason Robins telling investors the company can win the category "this NFL season and beyond". The lesson for a new entrant is not to copy the roadmap. It is to notice that the winners keep finding lower-regulation, lower-CAC ways to monetize the same audience.

Who builds a betting app instead of using DraftKings?

Not every founder who admires DraftKings should build a version of it. Here are the four situations where a custom build genuinely makes sense.

Tribal and regional casinos launching their own brand. A casino group with a physical property and a state license does not want to be a generic skin on someone else's platform. They want their brand, their loyalty program tied to the casino floor, and their own player data. Market access is already solved because they hold the license. For them, the build question is about owning the experience, not obtaining permission.

Media and audience brands converting readers into bettors. A sports media company with millions of registered users has the one thing incumbents pay $250-$750 to get: a warm audience. A custom product lets them tie betting accounts to existing profiles, keep the data, and market to their own list. A white-label skin cannot integrate with their subscriber database or feed behavior back into their CRM.

International operators entering a new US state. An established sportsbook from the UK, Europe, or Australia has trading expertise and a proven product but needs a US-compliant build with state-specific geolocation, KYC, and tax reporting. This is usually a re-platforming and compliance project rather than a from-scratch build.

Social and sweepstakes operators avoiding real-money licensing. A sweepstakes or social-casino model uses virtual currency and prize redemption to operate in most states without a gaming license. It is the lowest-friction way to prove an audience and monetize before committing to the cost of a licensed real-money product. Many operators start here deliberately.

V1, V2, V3: what to build in each phase and what it costs

The operators who ship treat this as three phases, not one launch. You prove an audience before you take on licensing, and you rent trading before you build it. Compressing all three into a single build is the most reliable way to run over budget and time.

V1: prove the audience without a gaming license ($150K-$250K, 16-22 weeks)

Start with DFS, social, or sweepstakes. No real-money sports wagering, which means no state-by-state operator licensing to open the doors.

• Contest lobby and salary-cap lineup builder

• Live scoring driven by a licensed sports-data feed (Sportradar, Genius Sports, or SportsDataIO)

• Player wallet with deposits and, for paid contests, compliant payouts

• Admin and contest-management console

• Age and identity checks appropriate to the model

You launch, you market, and you learn whether your audience actually plays. The data you gather here writes the scope for V2. If they do not engage with a free or low-stakes format, they were never going to fund a sportsbook.

V2: single-state real-money sportsbook via a managed provider (+$150K-$350K, 6-9 months)

Once you have an audience and a route to a license, you add the real-money book, in one state, on a rented trading platform.

• Integration with a licensed odds and trading provider (OpenBet, Kambi, Amelco, or GR8 Tech) so you are not pricing your own markets on day one

• Precise geolocation (GeoComply is the category standard) to block wagers from outside the licensed state

• KYC and AML identity verification tied to a compliant onboarding flow

• Responsible-gaming tools: deposit limits, cool-off periods, self-exclusion, and integration with state exclusion registers

• Regulated payment and payout rails

• The compliance reporting the state regulator requires

Most of this cost is not UI. It is vendor integrations, each with its own certification, and the compliance workflow that ties them together. This is the layer where teams that budgeted for "an app" discover the real shape of the project.

V3: multi-state, in-house trading, and casino (+$300K-$700K, ongoing)

This is the scale phase, and only a minority of operators reach it.

• Multi-state compliance, with a configuration layer for each state's rules and tax reporting

• Your own trading and risk engine, taken in-house once volume justifies replacing the revenue share you pay a managed provider

• Live and in-play betting, which raises the real-time and latency demands sharply

• Online casino, a separate licensing and content-integration effort

• Mature bonusing, loyalty, and CRM to defend the margin against acquisition costs

Each layer here is a program of work, not a feature. The move from renting trading to owning it, in particular, is a strategic decision with a nine-figure revenue threshold behind it, not an engineering checkbox.

Build vs buy: when does a custom sportsbook win?

Almost no new operator prices their own odds at launch. The real decision is where you sit on the spectrum between a fully turnkey platform and a fully owned stack.

Keep using a white-label or turnkey platform when:

• You are entering a single jurisdiction and want to launch in months, not years

• You do not want to run a trading and risk desk

• Your handle is still unproven, so paying a revenue share is cheaper than fixed engineering

• Compliance certification speed matters more than product differentiation

Build custom when:

• Your volume is large enough that the platform's revenue share (often 10-20% of gaming revenue) exceeds what it would cost to own the stack

• You need to control odds, margin, and product to differentiate from the generic skins

• You want to own player data and CRM rather than rent it, because retention economics are the whole game

• You run multiple brands or properties and want one platform underneath them

The payback math is concrete. If a turnkey provider takes 15% of gaming revenue and you are generating $20 million a year in revenue, that is $3 million annually flowing to your platform vendor. Against a custom trading and platform build in the low seven figures, the crossover comes fast. Below a few million in revenue, the turnkey provider is almost always the right answer.

Where sports betting builds go wrong

The failure mode we see most often in betting builds is a budget shaped like a consumer app when the product is a regulated financial platform. The bet slip and the scoreboard are the visible 30%. The geolocation, KYC, AML, responsible-gaming, trading, payments, and per-state compliance are the invisible 70%, and they are where the timeline actually lives.

Two specifics cause the most damage.

First, teams treat licensing as a parallel track that will "sort itself out" while engineering proceeds. It does not. The license, the market-access deal, and the vendor certifications gate your launch far more than the code does. The engineering can be done in six months while the regulatory path takes twelve to eighteen. Sequence the license first, or you build a finished product that cannot legally accept a bet.

Second, operators underprice retention. Acquiring a bettor at $250-$750 only works if you keep them. The loyalty, bonusing, and CRM layer is often deferred to "later," which means the operator spends heavily to acquire players who churn before they are profitable. Design the retention layer into V1, even when the money-making product is still two phases away.

How RaftLabs fits

We build the software layers that make regulated betting products work: compliant DFS platforms, player wallets, KYC and onboarding flows, and the player-management and loyalty systems that decide whether an operator keeps the bettors it pays to acquire. That work sits inside our sports betting software development practice and our iGaming compliance and KYC software work.

We are direct about what we do not do. We do not sell you a gaming license, and we do not run your trading desk. For most operators entering a market, renting odds and trading from a licensed provider is the right call, and we integrate with it. What we build is the product around it, the compliance plumbing beneath it, and the retention engine that turns a betting app into a business.

If you have a license or a route to one, or an audience you want to convert, the build case is usually strong. If you are starting from zero on both, the honest first step is often a DFS or sweepstakes product to prove the audience before you take on real-money licensing. We will tell you which of those you are in the first conversation.

The right starting point is a scoping call: which layer you actually need first, what your licensing and market-access situation looks like, and the realistic timeline to launch. Get those three clear and the build is straightforward.

Talk to us about your betting or fantasy product. We will tell you what to build first, what it will cost, and what the phased roadmap should look like.