What is the average sportsbook vig?

Roughly 4.5% on standard -110 / -110 markets. Much higher on props, same-game parlays, and exotic markets. Effective bankroll drag for an active bettor is often 6–10% per cycle.

How does funding rate compare to vig?

Funding is symmetric and floating. It can pay you. Vig is one-way and always favors the book. They are not the same.

Why is the same-game parlay vig so high?

Correlation tax. The sportsbook re-prices each leg to account for the correlation between outcomes. The re-pricing always favors the book and compounds across legs.

Are perp DEX fees fixed?

Most are roughly fixed per trade, with variable funding on top. uponly.win is the cleanest version: zero on opens, zero on losing closes, small variable cut on winnings only.

How do perp DEXes make money with no vig?

Through small explicit fees and through liquidity provision spreads. The total cost surface is structurally much smaller than a sportsbook.

Does uponly.win really charge nothing on losers?

Yes. You lose exactly your collateral. There is no open fee, no close fee, no surprise. The entire revenue model is a small cut on winning trades.

Sportsbook vig vs perp DEX fees: an honest comparison

Sportsbook bettors talk about vig the way crypto traders talk about gas. Everybody knows it is there, almost nobody calculates it precisely, and most users would change their behavior if they did. This post does the calculation, honestly, for both sportsbooks and perp DEXes.

what vig actually is

Vig (also called juice, hold, or margin) is the implied edge the sportsbook builds into the line. The simplest example: a perfectly fair 50/50 market should be +100 / +100. Sportsbooks offer it at -110 / -110. The difference is the vig — about 4.5% implied hold per bet.

You do not pay this as a separate fee. It is baked into the odds, which is why most casual bettors never internalize it. You just notice that you "run bad" over time and your bankroll bleeds.

real vig numbers across products

Approximate implied hold percentages by sportsbook product type, based on what is publicly documented.

Standard NFL moneyline / spread (-110 / -110): ~4.5% hold.
Standard NBA props (-115 / -115): ~6.8% hold.
Niche player props (-120 / -120 or worse): 8–12% hold.
Same-game parlays (3 legs): 15–25% implied hold.
Live in-play markets: 8–15% hold, often higher.
Boosted "specials" and exotic markets: regularly 20%+ implied hold despite the marketing.

For comparison, a typical Las Vegas roulette table has a 5.26% house edge. American sportsbook same-game parlays are routinely worse than American roulette. Most bettors do not know this.

what perp DEX fees actually are

Perp DEXes charge fees differently. Instead of building hold into the line (impossible — the price is the market), they charge explicit fees at specific moments.

Open fee: usually 0.05% to 0.1% of notional.
Close fee: usually 0.05% to 0.1% of notional.
Funding rate: variable, can pay you or charge you, normally between -0.1% and +0.1% per 8 hours.
Spread: usually a few basis points, sometimes zero on deep liquidity.

Total round-trip fee on a typical perp trade held for a few hours: 0.1% to 0.3% of notional. The price itself has no hidden margin — you pay the market price plus an explicit fee.

the uponly.win fee structure

uponly.win flips the model again. We do not charge open fees. We do not charge close fees on losing trades. Our entire revenue model is a small variable cut on net winnings only.

Open a position: 0% fee.
Close a losing position: 0% fee. You lose exactly your collateral and nothing more.
Close a winning position: a small variable cut comes off the profit.
Funding rate: pass-through from the underlying market on Avantis. Not retained by uponly.win.

A losing trade on uponly.win costs you exactly your collateral. Not collateral plus open fee. Not collateral plus close fee. Just collateral. This is the structural advantage of having no house.

the head-to-head

Let us put a $1000 bankroll through both systems with 100 round-trip bets, assuming the user is approximately break-even on directional skill.

Standard sportsbook (-110 / -110): expected drag from vig = 100 × $10 × 4.5% = $45. With same-game parlays in the mix, easily $80–$150.
Standard perp DEX: expected fee drag = 100 × $10 × ~0.2% per trade + variable funding. Roughly $5–$15 net.
uponly.win: expected fee drag = 0 on losers, small cut on winners. Effectively a few dollars over 100 trades.

Over a year of active churn, the gap between the sportsbook and uponly.win on a $1000 bankroll is approximately $40 to $150. For larger bankrolls or more active bettors, this scales linearly.

why sportsbooks can't lower vig

Sportsbooks have structural costs perp DEXes do not. They have to pay state licensing fees, marketing budgets that include massive TV ad spend, customer acquisition costs that approach $500 per user in some markets, and a real risk book to manage. The vig funds all of this.

Perp DEXes have one infrastructure cost (smart contracts and oracle feeds), one liquidity cost (paid to LPs through spread, not extracted from users), and almost no marketing cost compared to sportsbooks. The fee surface can be drastically smaller because the cost base is drastically smaller.

the loss tax problem

Here is the structural issue almost nobody talks about. At a sportsbook, you pay vig on every bet, including the ones you lose. When you lose a $110-to-win-$100 bet, you lost $110, but the vig portion was always going to be paid regardless of outcome. You are double-paying: you lose the bet AND you funded the book.

On a typical perp DEX, you pay open and close fees on both winners and losers. The fees are small but they exist. On uponly.win, losers pay nothing on top of the loss. This is a real structural difference and it compounds for active traders.

how vig actually feels

A typical recreational sports bettor who churns 100 bets a month and runs at 47% win rate is losing roughly 6% of their bankroll per cycle to vig alone, even though they are nearly break-even on skill. They blame variance. The math is mostly vig.

A typical perp trader on uponly.win running similar variance pays nothing on losing trades and a small cut on winners. The 6% structural drag does not exist. Their P&L is closer to their actual skill level, plus or minus variance. If you want the EV deep-dive, read prop bet vs perp trade EV.

what to look for in any perp DEX

Not all perp DEXes are created equal. Some build margin into spreads even though they advertise "low fees." A useful checklist.

Are open fees explicit and zero or near-zero?
Are close fees on losing trades the same as on winning trades?
Is the spread visible and competitive with the underlying market?
Are funding rates pass-through or retained by the platform?
Is there a "house" that takes the other side of your trade?

uponly.win answers cleanly on all five: zero opens, zero closes on losers, market spreads from Avantis, pass-through funding, no house. The only revenue is a cut on winnings.

run the numbers on yourself

Pull your sportsbook history. Add up your total stake across all bets over the last 12 months. Multiply by your average implied vig (4.5% if you bet mostly straight, more like 8–12% if you run a lot of props and parlays). That is roughly how much you handed the book before variance entered the equation.

Now imagine that number is zero on losses. That is the uponly.win pitch. Try it with a small bankroll at uponly.win and see the math in your own account.