Meet Pylon: the NFL DFS optimizer I always wanted

I've paid for most of the DFS optimizers out there. Some are genuinely good. All of them have a moment where you're three menus deep, fighting the tool instead of building lineups, wondering why the feature you actually need is buried or missing or locked behind a higher tier.

Pylon is my answer to that. It's an NFL DFS lineup optimizer that takes the ideas worth keeping from the tools you already know, cuts the parts that get in the way, and sharpens the ones that matter.

How it's different

The core concepts in DFS optimization aren't secret. Projections, salary, exposure, correlation, ownership. Everybody's tool touches them. The real difference is how much control you actually get, and how fast you can use it.

That's the whole design goal: take what the good tools do, make it faster, and stop hiding the levers that matter.

• Rules you can actually edit. Encode your reads as boost/dock and hard stacking rules instead of hoping the defaults match your thinking.
• Real exposure and variance control. Global, per-position, and per-player caps, plus a variance dial for when your 20 lineups all look like copies of one lineup.
• Your projections, not ours. Import whatever source you trust. DraftKings salaries stay authoritative.
• Showdown and Classic in one engine, with a captain-aware Showdown build.
• Clean DraftKings export. Crunch, review, download, upload. No reformatting.

I'm keeping the feature list short on purpose. The point isn't a spec sheet. It's that the tool gets out of your way.

Who's behind it

Just me. I'm a software developer who's played NFL DFS for six years, across cash and GPP. I built Pylon because the tools I was paying for kept getting in my way, and I had the skills to make something better. It's what I run my own lineups through every week, so it gets fixed the moment something about it stops working for me.

Where it's at

Pylon is in an invite-only beta right now, and free while it's early. I want real players running real slates through it and telling me what's broken before I open it up wider. It won't be free forever.

If that sounds useful, request a beta spot. Tell me how you play. It helps me decide what to build next.

To be clear: it's a tool, not a guarantee. DFS is hard and variance is real. What Pylon gives you is sharper control over the decisions that move your results.