Do trading bots actually make money on Polymarket?

The best ones do: arbitrage traders pulled in over 40 million dollars on Polymarket between April 2024 and April 2025, and 14 of the top 20 wallets by profit are bots. But those are professional operations. Retail bots routinely show winning paper results and lose real money to spreads, fees, partial fills and ghost fills. One operator put it plainly: his bot won 68 percent of trades and still lost money live.

Can you run a bot on Kalshi?

Yes, through Kalshi's official API. The fee math shapes everything: taker fees are about 1.75 cents per contract at 50 cent prices while maker fees run roughly 75 percent cheaper, so the Kalshi bots that survive are maker and market-making style, not takers. One public operator reports about 50,000 dollars in monthly volume at roughly 4 percent net per share traded.

What is the best open-source prediction market bot?

poly-maker (about 1,500 GitHub stars) is the most-starred genuine community bot, doing maker-side market making on Polymarket. PMXT (over 2,000 stars) is the infrastructure layer many cross-venue bots build on. MrFadiAi's Polymarket-bot ships four strategies with real risk limits and honest disclaimers.

Do I need a bot to trade prediction markets seriously?

Usually not. Most bot projects exist to fix slow manual execution and missing cross-venue visibility. A professional terminal covers both without code: Kairos aggregates Kalshi, Polymarket and Predict.fun into one order book with sub-second data and advanced order types, free. Build a bot when you have a genuine strategy; use a terminal when what you want is execution.

Best Prediction Market Bots (2026)

Polymarket and Kalshi automation ranked with verified GitHub stats, real operator numbers, and the honest math of why most retail bots lose. Each bot on its own page.

Updated September 8, 2026 · 18 bots reviewed on their own pages · every price checked against the live site

Short answer: bots run these markets more than most traders realize. Arbitrage traders pulled in over $40M on Polymarket in a single year, and 14 of the top 20 wallets by profit are bots. The best open-source starting points are poly-maker for market making and PMXT for cross-venue infrastructure. Be clear about the job first: most people reach for a bot because they want speed and every venue in one view, and that is a terminal's job.

Browse by category

7 categories

Market making1 bot Arbitrage3 bots AI agents3 bots Kalshi-native3 bots Copy trading3 bots Multi-strategy3 bots Infrastructure2 bots

The directory

19 bots · filter by category

Kairos Cross-venue trading terminal: Kalshi, Polymarket and Predict.fun in one order book, with sub-second data and advanced order types. K + PM + Predict.funfreea16z-backed
02poly-maker The most-starred genuine community bot: maker-only market making on the Polymarket CLOB, quoting both sides. Earns the spread instead of paying it. Polymarket1,475 ★Python
03PMXT Not a strategy, the plumbing: CCXT-style unified library across 15+ venues. Several of the better arb bots are built on it. cross-venue2,108 ★MIT
04Polymarket-bot (MrFadiAi) Four strategies with layered risk limits: arbitrage, hedged crypto-dip, filtered smart-money copying, and a fill-or-kill sniper. The README promises nothing, which is a quality signal here. Polymarket610 ★4 strategies
05CloddsBot Open-source Claude-based trading agent across ten venues with Kelly sizing and circuit breakers, pushed daily, no profit claims. 10 venues834 ★AI agent
06kalshi-trading-bot-cli The best-known Kalshi-native open bot: AI research into probability estimates into Kalshi trades. Kalshi378 ★TypeScript
07Kalshi weather bot Trades temperature markets off a 31-member forecast ensemble with Kelly sizing, and reports its real best result, $1.8K, right in the repo description. Kalshi + PM683 ★honest results
08prediction-market-arbitrage-bot Captured real 1.5 to 4.5% spreads, and the author's writeup is the best free education in the category: risk-free is theory, prices move between your two API calls. K + PM175 ★built on PMXT
09polymarket-arbitrage Cross-platform text-similarity market matching and bundle arb. Study it, but know the impressive win-rate screenshot is simulation data, which the README admits. K + PM261 ★sim results only
10BTC hourly arb detector Detects Polymarket vs Kalshi spreads on BTC one-hour markets. K + PM241 ★Python
11nothing-ever-happens Buys NO on every non-sports market. Self-described as mostly a meme, but it operationalizes a real tendency: roughly 70% of markets resolve NO. Polymarket986 ★one strategy
12OctoBot prediction module The established OctoBot project's Polymarket module: copy trading now, arbitrage under development. Beware the typosquatted lookalike repos. Polymarket111 ★GPL-3.0
13Polymarket-betting-bot Copy trading plus threshold strategies on crypto markets, encrypted key storage, honest disclaimers. Real but small. Polymarket99 ★TypeScript
Alphapoly (polymarket-alpha-bot) Finding logically related Polymarket markets with an LLM and entering the covering pair when it costs less than it pays. PolymarketOSS177 stars
Kalshi-Quant-TeleBot A Kalshi bot skeleton with three strategy modules and a Telegram control surface, to read and rebuild rather than run as-is. KalshiOSS71 stars
Prediction Markets Trading Bot Toolkits Rust copy trading on Polymarket with a prebuilt binary, dry-run by default and a circuit breaker. PolymarketOSS434 stars
DRADIS Running nine crypto-market strategies at a 50 ms tick on Kalshi or Polymarket from one Rust binary, starting in ghost mode. cross-venueOSS24 stars
Polymarket BTC 15-Minute Trading Bot A NautilusTrader-based multi-signal bot for Polymarket 15-minute BTC markets with $1 max trades and Grafana monitoring. PolymarketOSS583 stars
polymarket-tennis The data layer for a Polymarket tennis bot: market discovery, match identity resolution and a joined price-versus-score view. PolymarketOSS326 stars

The verified numbers

Claim	Detail	Source
$40M+ in arb profits	Arbitrage traders' take on Polymarket, April 2024 to April 2025	Yahoo Finance
14 of top 20 wallets are bots	By profit, per crypto researcher Stacy Muur	KuCoin News
$313 to ~$430K in one month	A lag-exploiting bot in 15-minute crypto markets, 98% win rate across 6,615 predictions	andrew.ooo analysis
Kalshi taker fee peaks at 1.75¢/contract	`0.07 × P × (1−P)` per contract, rounded up; maker rate is ~75% cheaper	Kalshi fee schedule

What operators actually report

Quotes from bot builders and operators, recovered from archived Reddit threads (links go to the archives).

"Paper trading it hit 76% win rate... Then went live and got absolutely [wrecked]. The spreads on Kalshi are 5-10¢ wide and fees are 3-4¢ round trip, so by the time you buy and sell you're starting 8-14¢ in the hole."

Bot builder on 15-minute crypto markets, r/PredictionsMarkets (archived)

"2,807 paper trades. 68% win rate. $570 profit. Then I plugged in real money and watched it bleed... That gap is where every retail Polymarket bot dies." The same post documents ghost fills, where the API says no fill but the trade filled on-chain, and fake P&L from exit orders that silently fail near close.

Polymarket bot operator, r/PredictionsMarkets (archived)

"He just waits for cheap opportunities on either side... keep the average cost of YES plus average cost of NO below $1.00. Guaranteed profit." The pair-cost mechanic behind one of the most profitable known 15-minute-market bots: inventory math, not prediction.

Analysis of the trader "gabagool", r/PredictionsMarkets (archived)

"I run a bot, it's allowed to trade on about 125 markets currently. Monthly trading is about $50k volume... Trailing 30 days I'm net around 4% per share traded... My worst outcomes have been from not interpreting rules the way the outcome was interpreted."

Kalshi bot operator, r/Kalshi (archived)

What works, what does not

Works: speed (WebSockets over REST polling, compiled languages for fast markets), maker-side strategies on Kalshi where fees run ~75% below taker rates, pair-cost accumulation, and market making that earns the spread.
Does not: running a published strategy (the arb window is under 3 seconds and the top wallets already run it faster), taker-side scalping into 5 to 10 cent spreads, and AI bots predicting the news without a real-time data pipe.
Setup gotchas that cost real money: on Polymarket, USDC must sit in the proxy funder address, not your wallet address, and every rejected order needs an on-chain balance check because of ghost fills. On Kalshi, read the settlement rules on every market; the operator above says rule misreads were his biggest losses.

Red flags before you trust any bot: requests for private keys or seed phrases, guaranteed-return language, review sites that funnel to their own product, repos with high stars but keyword-stuffed descriptions and a handful of commits, and profit screenshots that turn out to be simulations. This category has a documented pattern of throwaway GitHub repos that appear, farm keywords, and vanish. When in doubt, run only code you have read.

signal→size→fill→edge

Bots die in execution. Terminals are execution.

Wanted a bot for speed and cross-venue vision? The free Kairos terminal trades Kalshi, Polymarket and Predict.fun from one book, no keys to manage.

FAQ

Do bots really make money on prediction markets?

The professional ones do: $40M+ in Polymarket arb profits in a year, and bots holding 14 of the top 20 profit slots. Retail results are much worse, and the gap is execution: spreads, fees, partial fills and ghost fills eat paper edges.

Is botting allowed?

Yes on both major venues. Kalshi has an official trading API; Polymarket's order book is permissionless through its CLOB API. Read each venue's terms before running anything aggressive.

Why are there so few Kalshi bots?

Anonymity and fee structure. Kalshi accounts are private, so there is nothing to copy-trade, and taker fees make scalping start 8 to 14 cents in the hole round trip at mid prices. The surviving Kalshi bots are maker-style.

What is the cheapest way to start?

Clone one of the open-source repos above, run it against paper or tiny size, and measure fees honestly. If your bot idea reduces to faster execution and every venue in one view, start with a free terminal instead.