StatKing: How We Built a Free Betting Analytics Product Against $40/Month Competitors

Written for Founders, product managers, and designers building data-heavy consumer products — especially in sports analytics and betting.

The player props analytics market has a standard business model: charge bettors somewhere around $40 a month for hit rates, odds comparison, and +EV tools. StatKing's founder wanted to attack that model directly — give away the entire toolset for free, and win on simplicity where competitors win on depth.

That positioning shaped everything we designed. A free product for casual bettors can't look or behave like a professional trading terminal. It has to feel closer to a streaming app: everything findable, nothing intimidating, and dense sports data compressed into decisions rather than spreadsheets.

This is the overview of the full engagement. Three deep-dive articles cover the specific design decisions — links to each below.

What StatKing Was

StatKing was a US sports betting analytics product for player props — bets on individual player statistics like points, rebounds, or strikeouts. The product covered NBA, NFL, and MLB, comparing lines across nine sportsbooks including PrizePicks, Underdog, and DraftKings, with hit rates, implied probability, +EV flags, and real-time play-by-play tracking of a user's picks. It launched as a free tool and grew a Discord community of 30,000+ bettors, which remains active today.

The Scope: Product, Platforms, and Brand in Parallel

The initial brief asked for everything at once: iOS app, web app, and full brand identity, across four sports. Marharyta Korovina, running the project, restructured that into parallel tracks with staged sport coverage — NBA first, other leagues after launch — so the core product patterns could be validated on one sport before expanding to more.

StatKing's team picked Flatstudio in part because of how the studio approaches every engagement — building from the client's own problem rather than reapplying a pattern from the last similar project. That's the same principle behind every Flatstudio partnership, sports-tech or otherwise: there's always a better answer than the one that worked last time, because the studio keeps learning something new from the work itself.

The Three Design Problems Worth Reading About

1. The prop card that users rebuild themselves. Instead of one fixed card layout, StatKing lets bettors toggle individual stats — injuries, matchup rank, implied probability, hit rate windows — and locks that configuration per sport. The card answers "is this a good bet" in one look, but each user defines what "one look" contains.→ Read: We Didn't Design One Prop Card. We Designed the System That Builds It for Each User.

2. Filters modeled on streaming apps, not trading terminals. Every filter — sport, market, odds range, sportsbooks, hit rate, +EV — sits behind one persistent Filters control that opens a single consolidated window, instead of scattering across tooltips and modals. Users save filter combinations as presets and switch between them, instead of rebuilding filters every session.→ Read: Why StatKing's Filters Work Like a Streaming App's Menu, Not a Trading Terminal

3. Two Figma files that stay visually identical. iOS (~2,800 components) and web (~2,360) live in separate files connected only by a shared brand color library — everything else is deliberately rebuilt in parallel. The benchmark was Apple's own Notes and Reminders: switch platforms, barely notice.→ Read: Two Figma Files, One Brand Library: How We Kept StatKing's iOS and Web Apps Visually Identical

The Brand: A 3D Crown Against a Market of Tables

StatKing's identity — a black-and-yellow system built around a 3D crown — came out of a stylescape process: quick visual explorations of emotional direction shown to the client before any logo work began. The client landed on a direction in minutes, a sharp contrast to the longer moodboard cycles Flatstudio had run on earlier brand projects. That process shift stuck, and now shapes brand discovery on every Flatstudio engagement since.

The full identity — logotype grid, fluid gradients, typography, photography rules, and a social media visual system the client's team runs without a dedicated designer — is documented in the StatKing Branding case.

What We'd Flag Honestly

Running product, platforms, and brand in parallel consumed most of the budget on build, leaving little runway for the marketing phase the client had planned around Instagram and Twitch partnerships. The engagement ended before an independent marketing push began, so there is no post-launch conversion data to report — the product's community traction (the 30,000+ Discord, still active today) is the observable public signal. The product did launch and run for a period afterward; as of publishing, it's no longer listed on the App Store and, as far as we know, is currently up for sale.

Building a sports analytics or betting product? Flatstudio has designed player props tools, sportsbooks, and odds platforms for 8+ years — StatKing ran on the studio's Dedicated Product Team model, embedded alongside the client's engineers. Start with the sports analytics portfolio to see comparable work.

The StatKing series: Prop Card UX · Filter Architecture · Cross-Platform Design System Case pages: StatKing Web · StatKing iOS · StatKing Branding · statking.ai — the live marketing site