# What to use instead of PredictionBook

It went read-only in January 2024 and dark in February 2025. Every URL now answers with a retirement notice and a 403. Where a calibration record goes.

*https://predictionmarkets.tools/alternatives/predictionbook*

## The subject

| Field | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Product | PredictionBook |
| Status | retired |
| Stopped serving | 2025-02-12 |
| Website | https://predictionbook.com/ |
| Category | Forecasting Platforms |

A public notebook for personal predictions, where you wrote down what you thought would happen, attached a probability and a date, and were scored on how calibrated you turned out to be.

## Replacements

*Ordered by how much of the original’s job each one covers, closest first. Paid placement does not affect this order.*

1. [Fatebook](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/fatebook.md) — The successor the operator named, and the same act — a question, a probability, a deadline, a calibration chart. Private by default rather than public.
2. [Confido](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/confido.md) — The same workspace on a server you control, so the machine that can be switched off next time is yours. Maintained, where PredictionBook's own code is archived.
3. [Metaculus](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/metaculus.md) — The public half — a question list you forecast alongside strangers, scored properly, with a track record on your profile that anyone can read.
4. [Manifold](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/manifold.md) — The part where anyone could ask anything and get answers by morning, except the answer arrives as a play-money price rather than a column of stated credences.
5. [Quantified Intuitions](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/quantified-intuitions.md) — The calibration loop without the wait — questions that already resolved, scored in ninety seconds instead of in a year.

## The product

PredictionBook was a notebook for predictions with the probability written down next to them. You
typed a sentence about the future, gave it a number between 0 and 100 percent and a date by which
it would be known, and on that date somebody marked it right or wrong. Your profile then drew the
only chart the site cared about: of everything you called 60 percent, how much of it actually
happened. Anyone could add their own number to a public prediction, so a question often carried a
column of credences from half a dozen strangers and a comment thread arguing about its wording.
Nothing was traded, nothing was priced, and there was no currency of any kind.

It ran for about seventeen years — the footer of the last working capture reads "PredictionBook ©
2008-2025" — and was built by TrikeApps, the development arm of the Investling Group, which later
merged into Bellroy. The code has been public since 6 March 2013, when the repository was created
under that company's GitHub account; its README names a BSD licence, and there is no licence file
in the repository. Both of those were read on 20 September 2026.

**How it ended, with dates.** On 22 August 2023 the operator opened issue 262 in the project's own
repository and wrote that the level of active use no longer justified the resources required for
maintenance. Effective 10 January 2024 the site would become read-only, and "one year after
becoming read-only, PredictionBook.com is scheduled for permanent shutdown." Read-only arrived on
schedule: the repository's final commit and its archiving both carry the date 10 January 2024, and
from then on every page served its whole history under a banner with no way to add to it.

The permanent shutdown came about a month late and with no second announcement. The Internet
Archive's last successful capture of a prediction page is 10 February 2025 at 07:46 UTC, and it
still shows the read-only banner, the resolution date and the individual estimates. The archive's
first capture of the retirement page is 12 February 2025 at 22:51 UTC. This page records 12
February 2025 as the end, because that is the first moment in the public record at which the site
served nothing else — the true date is somewhere in the 63 hours between the two, and nobody
published it.

## What to use instead

Nothing replaces it whole, because it was two products sharing a database: a private scoring
notebook and a public question board. Pick by the one you used.

**If you were keeping your own record**, go to [Fatebook](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/fatebook). It is what the
retirement notice itself recommends, and the act is the same one — write the question, set the
deadline, give it a number, get a Brier score and a calibration chart when it resolves. It is also
made by Sage rather than by the people who shut PredictionBook down, which is worth knowing rather
than reassuring. The working difference is the default: PredictionBook was public unless you made
a prediction private, and Fatebook is private unless you share it.

**If the thing you actually want is that this does not happen to you again**, run
[Confido](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/confido) yourself. It is AGPL, self-hosted, and gives you rooms, calibration
curves and a normalised Brier score on a server you control. PredictionBook was open source too,
which did not save it: the repository is archived, and the operator's stated reason for shutting
the site was that nobody had the time or the skillset to keep a Rails application safe as its
dependencies aged. Self-hosting moves that job to you; it does not abolish it.

**If you were there to read other people's numbers**, [Metaculus](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/metaculus) is the serious
version of that — a public question list you forecast alongside everyone else, scored on a proper
rule, with a track record on your profile that a stranger can check, and staff who resolve each
question against the source named in its own criteria. What you do not get is the midnight
question about your own life: you forecast the questions Metaculus decided to ask.

**If what you liked was that anyone could ask anything**, that is [Manifold](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/manifold).
Anyone opens a question, the creator resolves it, and an audience turns up within the hour. The
shape of the answer is different — a play-money price rather than a list of who said what — and
the incentive changes with it, because on Manifold there is a position to hold and on
PredictionBook there was only a statement to be scored on.

**If the point was the calibration training rather than the questions**,
[Quantified Intuitions](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/quantified-intuitions) is the fastest route: it serves questions
that have already resolved, so the feedback loop that used to take a year takes ninety seconds.
Use it beside one of the others, not instead.

## What you give up

**A column of credences instead of a price.** This is the loss nobody advertises. On
PredictionBook eight people could put eight numbers on one sentence and every number stayed
visible with a name and a timestamp beside it; disagreement was legible, and you could see who was
usually right about what. [Manifold](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/manifold) aggregates that into one price and the
individuals disappear behind it, [Metaculus](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/metaculus) publishes a community distribution
on questions it chose, and [Fatebook](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/fatebook) is mostly you alone. The crowd on an
arbitrary question you wrote yourself, stated as numbers rather than as a market, is the thing
that has no direct replacement here.

**Seventeen years of record, unless you personally exported it.** There is no dump. Between 24
August and 23 September 2023, users in the announcement thread asked twice for one — first a
static copy, then a database dump with private data stripped; the operator answered that keeping
the application running to serve it was not possible, pointed at the Internet Archive, and said a
pull request implementing the stripped dump would be welcome. None landed before the site went
dark. Private predictions were never public and are in no archive at all.

**Every link anyone ever made to it.** Prediction numbers ran past 212,000, and the Internet
Archive's index holds roughly 14,700 distinct numbered prediction pages — under a tenth of them,
and counted from the index rather than from opening each one. Nothing redirects and nothing is
paraphrased: a decade of citations in forum threads, blog posts and bibliographies now resolves to
the same two-line notice, served with a 403.

## Migration notes

**The dedicated importer is dead, and the page offering it is still up.** Fatebook still lists
"Import from PredictionBook" and still asks for a PredictionBook API token. Its implementation,
which we read on 20 September 2026, pages through the `my_predictions` endpoint on the subject's
own domain using that token — and that endpoint returns the retirement page with HTTP 403, as
every other path there does. The import will therefore find nothing, and the failure looks like an
empty account rather than an error. Do not spend an evening on it.

**If you do have an old CSV, use the spreadsheet import instead.** Fatebook's spreadsheet route
asks for a question title, your forecast as a number between 0 and 100 percent, a question created
date, and a resolution that is YES, NO, AMBIGUOUS or blank, with optional columns for the resolved
and resolve-by dates, tags and notes. A PredictionBook export has all of that under different
column names, so this is a rename job in a spreadsheet, not a data-recovery job.

**The Internet Archive is the only remaining copy, and it is searchable by index rather than by
guesswork.** The CDX API will list what exists before you start opening pages:

```
curl "http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=predictionbook.com/predictions*\
&output=text&fl=original,timestamp&collapse=urlkey"
```

Grep that for the prediction numbers you remember, then fetch
`https://web.archive.org/web/TIMESTAMP/URL` for each hit. Captured pages preserve the question
text, the deadline, the resolution and the individual estimates. They do not preserve your login,
your private predictions or your calibration graph, and the archive's own content servers were
intermittently unavailable on the day we checked, so expect to retry.

**Running your own copy is possible and probably not what you want.** The code is archived but
still on GitHub, and the founders said plainly in September 2023 that anyone was welcome to stand
up their own instance on their own domain. What you would be standing up is a Rails and Postgres
application whose last commit is dated 10 January 2024, with the dependency rot that the operators
named as their reason for stopping. If the appeal is self-hosting rather than this particular
codebase, [Confido](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/confido) is the maintained answer.

## FAQ

### Is PredictionBook really gone, or just quiet?

Gone. On 20 September 2026 the root of the domain returns a single paragraph saying PredictionBook is retired and recommending Fatebook; every other path — a prediction, a profile, the JSON API — returns that same paragraph with HTTP 403. There is no login page, no read-only archive and no export. The last capture of a working page in the Internet Archive is dated 10 February 2025.

### Can I still get my own predictions out?

Only if you exported them before February 2025, or if they were public and the Internet Archive happened to crawl the page. The CSV export lived behind a login and there is no login any more. Predictions marked visible to their creator were never crawlable by anyone, so for those the answer is no, without qualification.

### Does Fatebook's "Import from PredictionBook" still work?

No, although the page is still there and still asks for an API token. Its implementation, read on 20 September 2026, pages through the my_predictions endpoint on predictionbook.com, and that endpoint now returns the retirement notice with HTTP 403. If you have an old CSV, use Fatebook's spreadsheet import instead.

### Could somebody restart it?

Nobody has, and the operator said no when asked. The code is open and anyone may run their own copy, but in September 2023 the founders declined to hand over the domain or the user data, on the grounds that users had not agreed to their data moving. A new instance would therefore start empty, which is what Fatebook and Confido already are.

### Was there any money in it?

None. There was no currency, no stake and no prize — it recorded probabilities and scored them, and that was the whole product. The closest replacements are therefore the scored forecasting platforms in this catalogue rather than any venue where a position costs something.