Sportsbet relies on Ably to handle 4.5 million daily chat messages on its ‘Bet With Mates’ platform

When it launched in 2022, ‘Bet With Mates’ solved many of Sportsbet’s customer problems by allowing fans to easily create new betting groups. It takes away the need for manual spreadsheets for tracking funds, winnings and all the other admin associated with group betting. However customers were still coming off the platform (second-screening) to talk about their bets and banter with each other in WhatsApp and other chat apps. Sportsbet wanted to introduce that functionality into ‘Bet With Mates’ and provide everything their customers needed without ever having to leave the platform.

Sportsbet needed a chat feature that met their customers’ high expectations of messaging applications - it had to be feature-rich including reaction and reply functionality and also update in realtime. As an extremely event driven business with huge traffic spikes during major events like the Australian Football League, National Rugby League finals, and the Melbourne Cup, the solution needed to be highly performant and scalable. 

It had to demonstrate great frontend performance figures, integrate well into Sportsbet’s build pipeline, and be future-proofed for other realtime use cases that developers were planning. As well as latency needs, Sportsbet also had very stringent security and data handling requirements, so the solution needed to be hosted within Australia on a dedicated cluster.

Knowing what they wanted to build, Sportsbet turned its attention to how and when they could deliver it. They initially looked into building new realtime infrastructure themselves but knowing they wanted to have the product in customer hands before the next AFL season launch, that gave them less than 4 months to deliver a whole new product end-to-end, and their initial assessment told them partnering up was going to shave months off their timelines.

Sportsbet decided against building their own solution straight away. Had they spun their own realtime infrastructure for ‘Bet With Mates’, Sportsbet calculated it would have taken four experienced engineers roughly two person-months of dedicated effort to complete. Yet the result of all this hard work would have just been a basic implementation without the advanced dashboards, flexibility and no future-proofing.

They then evaluated a number of different solutions, including other realtime SaaS providers and offerings from major cloud providers.

From the start Ably stood out. Early assessments of Ably’s documentation encouraged Sportsbet to quickly move to build a proof of concept. This involved dedicated support from the Ably team to consult on requirements, providing access to SDKs for their chosen tech stack, and creating a sandbox environment to conduct some integration testing and analysis.  

They started out building a prototype using Ably React Hooks with their existing react client and were impressed with how quickly they could get a basic chat feature going without having to build services. They then added some components that published events including bet placements and group activity as well as features like reactions and comments in the same message stream.

Andy Camera, Head of Technology - Customer To Customer, at Sportsbet said, “It struck us how extremely patient Ably were with our demanding requirements, the level of rigour we require in the testing and outcomes before being confident to proceed, and the documentation and developer experience was spoken very highly of, from even our most difficult to please engineers!”

Sportsbet’s focus on performance and keeping customers' data secure meant that they wouldn’t entertain remote hosting or shared instances. Ably responded to this request and rapidly spun a new dedicated cluster within Australia specifically for Sportsbet, which removed another potential barrier to hitting the February timeline. Ably’s SAML integration also enabled them to plug into their existing SSO system in record time.

The ‘Bet With Mates’ chat feature has proven a hit with fans, contributing to the organic growth of the overall ‘Bet with Mates’ platform. It has also proven sticky – customers who use ‘Bet With Mates’ Chat use it regularly. 

Sportsbet put this success down to Ably’s unwavering reliability when it comes to performance and message delivery. They also reported that autoscaling has performed flawlessly without any incidents of concern in over a year, even on high traffic days. Peak figures for these high traffic periods have reached around 4.5 million published messages a day. 

Reflecting on the success of the project and relationship with Ably, Andy commented:

“Ably has been excellent with understanding our scaling needs and proactively ensuring we have the right pre and autoscaling in place for every season of the sporting calendar.“By choosing to partner with Ably, we were able to deliver a high quality outcome in a frankly impressive timeframe, and free up our delivery teams earlier to focus on other initiatives. It’s a testament to the strength of Ably’s offering how much of our time with them is spent discussing other potential use cases rather than the current implementation.”