Melven – every pick published before kickoff

What is Melven?

Melven is a site Vestra designed and built from scratch: a football prediction model that publishes every single pick before the match starts. The idea is simple – judge us on the record, not the marketing. Every pick, edge percentage, market odds and full match report is open on melven.ai, and the track record is public, available to anyone without logging in.

The model prices the match

Each team gets an Elo rating built on more than 14,000 historical matches, which sets the gap in strength. The Dixon-Coles method turns that gap into a full distribution over possible scorelines. The model prices every match on its own, before it ever looks at a bookmaker. Its probabilities are then compared with market odds, and a pick is only published when the edge is large enough – across 1X2, goal totals (O/U) and BTTS markets.

Published and hash-anchored

Every pick is timestamped and hash-anchored at publish, with a frozen stake computed with half-Kelly from the live bankroll. Picks are graded at the frozen odds on the 90-minute score – no cherry-picking, no deletions, no re-grading. Model calibration and the staking history are public too, so anyone can verify the results.

Many competitions, one track record

Melven launched for the 2026 World Cup and was then extended into a league-agnostic product: Iceland's Besta deild karla joined over the summer and the Premier League in August 2026. New competitions are added to a registry without code changes, and every pick flows into the same bankroll and the same ledger. The research layer – title race forecasts, power rankings and match reports with line-ups and form – updates automatically.

The technology

The site is built with Next.js and React, with Convex as the real-time database and backend; an automated ingestion pipeline pulls predictions from the model and odds from the betting markets every fifteen minutes. Sign-in runs through Clerk and subscriptions are built on Polar, although everything stays open while the product is in its launch phase. The look is a brutalist design system Vestra built on top of shadcn/ui: square, hard shadows and monospaced type that put the numbers and transparency front and centre.

Melven is analytics, not betting advice: statistical research on football match pricing, with no bookmaker affiliations and no links to betting operators.

See Melven live at melven.ai.