u/gcampb41

Just wanted to check in.

I shared my machine learning model reports and race analysis for the very first time here in this sub way back in December last year.

Happy to say I stuck with the project and have been posting these regularly ever since. My primary goal was to get in contact with other likeminded people interested in racing and analysis and I’ve met a great bunch of folk through this journey - some of who I work with closely on a day to day basis now. I even got a job in the industry for a parimutuel syndicate, so happy days!

The overarching goal of doing all of this is connect with likeminded people , so if your building systems happy to chat and happy to help and learn from one another.

Currently I publish a daily report, utilising 4 primary machine learning models all trained on historical data, with four further models trained on various other metrics with the goal of providing pre-off analysis and probabilities.

I just updated my reports again today, with the latest models that I had been working on in the background, added user guides on how I think they should be utilised and also full strike rates for transparency.

Here is the link to the reports, they get updated daily https://gcampb41.github.io/HoofsAnalysisV2/

There is also links to the now archived V1 reports.

Pretty much everyone I’ve come into contact with one way or another has been via this subreddit funnily enough. There are no signups no paywall etc, no catch.

Curious to get the view from people who model or bet US racing seriously.

My main focus is UK & Irish racing. I work with fairly feature-rich ML models built on a pretty deep dataset: ratings, pace, market variables, race composition, sectional/stride information where available, historical patterns, engineered features, etc. The UK/IRE side has generally been encouraging for me across a number of markets.

I’ve recently into US racing and have put together what I’d consider a fairly complete historical dataset going back to around 2010, including a lot of race metadata, sectional data, pace/speed related information and the usual structured variables you’d expect for ML modelling.

Early results have surprised me a bit.

The models are showing genuine predictive ability - good strike rates, sensible ranking power, signals that would normally suggest there’s something there - but when I test against BSP-equivalent pricing (simply because that’s the price data and markets I currently have access to), the long-term ROI picture looks pretty low, flat, or marginally negative. Compared to my UK/IRE work, the market feels… sharp.

So I’m wondering whether the consensus among US bettors/modelers is that this is largely expected?

Is the real opportunity in US racing generally found in exotics and pool construction, rather than in trying to beat relatively efficient straight markets?

For a brief moment, it actually worked.

I build Actors on Apify, and like many developers, I struggled to make usage-based pricing add up. Users hesitate to run things when every execution has a cost. Revenue is unpredictable. It’s hard to justify maintaining anything long-term.

Then rentals clicked.

A simple monthly fee. Users understood it, trusted it, and were willing to pay. For the first time, I started earning from my work. Not massively — but enough to justify building, improving, maintaining. Apify took their cut, I took mine, and the model made sense.

Then came the announcement. https://www.reddit.com/r/apify/comments/1rpswcb/apify_your_pricing_changes_for_builders_is_unfair/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

We were told rentals were on the way out. Fine — not ideal, but we were given a window. Time to adjust, rethink pricing, migrate gradually. That’s how it was framed.

But what actually happened was different.

New rentals were quietly killed off.
Existing ones started losing visibility.
Actors began appearing as “under maintenance” when they weren’t.

And now we’re told rentals will be fully sunset, with automatic migration to pay-per-usage in October.

So the timeline says one thing. The platform behaviour says another.

Because in reality, rentals already feel dead.

That’s the problem. This isn’t just a pricing change — it’s removing the only model where developers could reliably earn, and doing it in a way that undermines it before the official cutoff.

Usage pricing might make sense for infrastructure. But for developers, it changes the equation entirely. It fragments revenue, introduces friction, and makes it harder to build anything sustainable on top.

Rentals were simple. They worked. People paid for them.

Now they’re being phased out, suppressed, and replaced with something that — for many of us — simply doesn’t.

So here’s the conclusion I’ve come to:

When rentals end, so will my Actors.

They’ll be removed, the code destroyed, and no longer available.

Thanks Apify.