How to Start a Betting Company: An Online Sportsbook, Step by Step

A betting company sells prices. Before the first bet it needs a license for the markets it serves, a platform that takes and settles bets, odds and data feeds, someone managing the risk on every event, and payment providers willing to process gambling. This guide takes those steps in order, with published government costs and the Georgian international sports betting permit as one route.

What a Betting Company Needs Before the First Bet

A sportsbook has more moving parts than a casino, because the product is a price that changes every second during a match. The table lists what has to be in place and where it usually comes from.

1. Choose Markets, Sports and Bet Types

The player markets come first, because they decide the license and the countries you must block. The sports follow the market: a book for European players is built around football, one for South Asian players around cricket, and a sportsbook that prices the wrong sports looks foreign to its players.

Then decide the bet types. Pre-match betting can run on a small team; in-play betting, where odds move during the event, needs fast live data, automatic suspension when something happens on the pitch, and traders watching. The revenue in both is the margin built into the odds. Under a Georgian permit, tax is charged on the bets accepted from foreign players minus the winnings paid to them, so the margin, not the turnover, sets the bill (Tax Code Art. 97(9³)).

2. Pick the Sports Betting License

Single-license regimes cover casino and betting together, while Georgia, Malta and Estonia license sports betting separately. The table shows government charges only, with the yearly license fee apart from the one-off charges of year one and tax on its own base.

Year one also carries one-off charges, kept out of the yearly column. Georgia: a platform audit of up to about €12,000 and control-system integration of up to about €34,400, caps the contract settles, so up to about €46,400, plus a €3,400 prize fund security, held as a guarantee rather than paid. Curaçao: €4,592 to apply plus €150 per beneficial owner. Anjouan: the €17,828 issuance fee in place of the first renewal, plus an application fee it does not publish. Malta: €5,000 to apply. Isle of Man: about €6,300 (£5,250) to apply. Kahnawake: about €35,700 ($40,000) to apply, including the first year's fee. Estonia: €35,160 for the toto activity license and operating permit.

Capital rules separate them too. Malta asks €100,000 of paid-up share capital for fixed-odds betting and Estonia €130,000 for toto, while Georgia sets no minimum. A Georgian sports betting license under Law No. 1822 needs no betting shop behind it, which is the difference from the domestic online permit, tied to a land betting house and a quarterly gambling business fee. The question of which license suits a sportsbook usually turns on the target markets, the term and the banking each regulator unlocks rather than on the fee alone.

3. Set Up the Company and the Prize Fund Security

Most sports betting regulators license a local company. Georgia's international permits go only to companies registered in Georgia, with foreign owners and directors allowed, a management address in Georgia and server infrastructure located there. Forming a Georgian company for iGaming comes first in the timeline, because the bank account, the address and the hosting all sit in its name.

A sportsbook in Georgia also posts a prize fund security of at least about €3,400, by bank guarantee or a financial-risk insurance policy, with the application (gambling law Art. 3(მ), 12(1²) and 12(1⁴)). Other regulators protect player money in other ways: Curaçao requires sufficient funds at all times to pay out prizes, with player money in a segregated account, and the Isle of Man requires player funds in a Manx bank and secures funds held outside a designated client account at 100%.

4. Choose the Sportsbook Platform

A sportsbook platform splits into the front end and account system on one side and the betting engine and trading tools on the other, and they may come from one provider or two. A turnkey platform runs under your own license with your own feed and payment contracts; a white label usually runs under the provider's license, where the regulator allows it; your own build gives full control at the cost of time and certification.

In Georgia the trade-off between a white label and your own license is settled by law: each permit is issued to the operator for one website and cannot be transferred, so the choice is turnkey or own build. A self-built online betting system has to be tested and certified by Random Systems Georgia, the state's control-system operator (gambling law Art. 36¹(8)), and a rented one comes from a supplier holding a Georgian supply permit.

5. Sign Odds and Data Feeds

Feeds give the sportsbook its fixtures, pre-match and live prices, live scores and the official results that settle bets. Coverage, speed and settlement accuracy matter more than the headline number of events: a live price that arrives late is a price someone else has already beaten, and a wrong result means paying the wrong bets.

Feed and trading suppliers can fall under supplier licensing. The Georgian Government's list of essential products for the supply permit includes totalizator systems and the supply of game information in real time, so check before signing whether each feed and trading supplier needs a Georgian supply permit. Curaçao requires its prior approval before a licensee contracts a platform, game or payment supplier, and from 24 December 2026 platform and game suppliers to Curaçao operators need their own B2B license.

6. Set Up Trading and Risk Management

Trading is where a sportsbook makes or loses its margin. Traders set the margin per market, the stake and payout limits per customer, and the liability the book will carry on each outcome, then move prices or close markets when the money comes in on one side. Integrity alerts flag betting patterns that suggest inside information or a fixed event, and players who only take mispriced lines or bonus value get profiled and limited.

7. Set Up Payments

Betting is coded as merchant category 7995 by the card schemes, and Visa's Core Rules require an online gambling merchant to hold a valid license for its site and an acquirer normally to take merchants from its own country. Withdrawals matter as much as deposits. Payout speed and the methods each market uses carry more weight than the number of logos on the cashier page.

Georgian-licensed operators already take Visa, Mastercard and American Express deposits, with channels at TBC Bank, Bank of Georgia and Liberty Bank, according to Adjarabet's published payment rules. Georgia's 2021 restriction covers payments by Georgian residents to foreign gambling companies, not Georgian-licensed ones. No Georgian bank has yet said publicly that it acquires card payments for international permit holders, so the bank account for a gambling company and the acquiring contract are separate tracks to open early. Crypto deposits have no lawful route under the Georgian permits as of October 2026.

8. Build In KYC, AML and Responsible Gambling

A Georgian permit holder is an accountable person under the anti-money laundering law. Every online player is identified and verified at registration, suspicious transactions are reported to the Financial Monitoring Service the same day, receipts, winnings and payouts above about €17,200 are reported within 5 working days, and records are kept 5 years. The site shows the operator's details, permit number and rules in Georgian and English and states that Georgian citizens and foreigners under 18 may not bet.

Responsible gambling tools follow the license conditions and the markets you serve, with deposit limits, time-outs and self-exclusion as the base. Sports integrity sits alongside AML for a betting company, because a suspicious bet on a fixed match is both a money-laundering signal and a trading loss.

9. Hire the Team

The roles that set a sportsbook apart from a casino are traders and risk managers, plus customer support whose workload follows the fixture list: weekends, evenings and big tournaments. Around them sit a compliance officer at senior management level, payments and fraud staff, retention and VIP managers, affiliate managers and a finance function that files Georgian gambling tax every month.

Tbilisi already supplies the industry. Random Systems Georgia's published permit list, which covers 2019 to 2023, shows Georgian supply permits held by Entain Georgia, Evolution Georgia, Spribe Georgia and Smartsoft among 37 game suppliers, and Evolution's 2025 annual report counts 4,813 staff in Georgia. Average gross monthly earnings were about €1,513 in information and communication in the second quarter of 2026, according to Geostat.

10. Budget the First Year

Government fees are fixed and published. The cost of a Georgian gambling license for sports betting in year one is the permit fee plus Random Systems Georgia's audit and integration charges, which are caps set by Government resolution, plus the prize fund security.

The costs that need quotes, because no regulator publishes them:

• Platform. Setup and a monthly fee or a share of gross gaming revenue for turnkey, or development and certification time for an own build.
• Feeds. Pre-match and live odds, live data and results, usually priced by sport, coverage and bet types.
• Trading. A managed trading service, your own traders, or a mix.
• Payments. Transaction fees, rolling reserves and chargebacks.
• Liability cash. Money to pay winners on a bad weekend, on top of the prize fund security.
• People and marketing. The team in step 9, affiliate commission, sponsorship and media.

From year two the Georgian fixed cost falls to the €34,400 permit fee, with 5% tax and a 1% monitoring fee on gross gaming revenue each month.

Starting a Sportsbook Under Georgia's International Totalizator Permit

The route runs in this order, with the published maximum for each step:

1. Register the Georgian company, open its bank account, and arrange the management address, the server hosting and the prize fund guarantee or insurance.
2. Register on Random Systems Georgia's portal (approved within 5 days) and sign its service agreement.
3. Pay the audit fee; the initial audit of the betting platform starts within 20 days and runs up to 45 days for online games.
4. Integrate with the control system, up to 30 days, and receive the authorization certificate within 2 days.
5. File with the Revenue Service and pay the first year's permit fee; the decision comes within 20 days or the permit is deemed issued.
6. Register with the Financial Monitoring Service within 10 business days of the permit.

We plan this at two to four months, most of it the audit and integration. A casino added to the same brand needs the casino and slots permits as well, and the steps to start an online casino share the company, the certification and the payments work, so the filings can be prepared side by side.

How to Start a Betting Company FAQ