Autodarts Lens: scoring darts with your phone, and where it runs out

Autodarts describes three ways to score in its app: Lens, hardware autoscoring, and manual entry. Lens is the one that needs nothing but the device in your pocket — it uses the camera on a phone or tablet to detect darts as they land, and posts the score automatically.

It is the same Autodarts account, the same app and the same games either way. Lens is not a separate product you switch to; it is one of the scoring methods available inside the platform, alongside connecting an Autodarts X, an Autodarts Vantage, or a custom DIY setup like the ones we build.

That matters more than it sounds. Nothing you do with Lens is wasted if you later add hardware — your account, your stats, your history and your friends all carry over. You are not choosing a camp.

Autodarts publishes a free plan at £0 "forever". On it, Lens scores 5 matches per month. You also get core statistics (averages and match history), the voice caller, entry to the platform’s online tournaments, and 11 classic game modes.

That tournament line is worth pausing on, because it is the single most misunderstood thing about Autodarts pricing: entering the online tournaments is free on any account. The paid tier is what lets you create your own. You do not need to subscribe to anything to play strangers online.

5 matches a month is roughly one evening. It is plainly designed as a taste rather than a way to live — but as a taste it is generous, and it is enough to answer the only question that matters before you spend money.

Autodarts Plus is £5.99 a month or £59.99 a year. It removes the Lens match limit entirely and adds advanced statistics, the Huw Ware premium caller, the ability to create your own tournaments, two extra game modes (Killer and 121 Checkout), custom dart appearance, and an AI referee for disputed darts.

The catch is in that last one. Autodarts’ own App Store listing states that the AI referee "Requires dedicated autoscoring hardware". So a Plus subscriber scoring with Lens gets unlimited matches and everything else on the list — but not the referee, because reviewing a dart’s landing position needs the fixed camera footage that only a mounted setup produces.

We earn nothing from Plus either way, and we are not going to pretend it is bad value: unlimited phone scoring for the price of two pints a month is a fair deal. It is just worth going in knowing which feature does not come with it.

Three things, and they are not small.

First, it removes the decision. The hardest part of getting into automatic scoring has always been spending money on something you have never tried. Lens deletes that problem entirely — you can find out tonight, for nothing.

Second, it travels. A phone goes to a mate’s house, to a holiday let, to the board in the garage you only use twice a year. No permanent setup can do that, and no permanent setup should try.

Third, it is the right answer for a genuinely casual player. If you throw a few legs a month and mostly want the maths done for you, a phone propped against a beer glass is not a compromise — it is the correct amount of equipment.

We have not bench-tested Lens against our own kits, and we are not going to publish accuracy numbers we did not measure — anyone quoting you a percentage comparison has almost certainly made it up. What we can talk about honestly is the structural difference, because that part is geometry rather than opinion.

A permanent camera setup watches the board from three or four fixed positions, calibrated once and never moved. A phone watches from one position that changes every time you set it down. When two darts land close together, a second viewpoint is what resolves which is which; a single camera has to infer it. That is not a criticism of the software — it is the reason multi-camera setups exist at all.

Then there is the practical side, which people underestimate until they live with it. Your phone becomes the scorer, so it is mounted, occupied and draining for the whole session: no music, no messages, no putting it in your pocket between legs. It needs somewhere to stand where it can see the board and where a stray dart will not reach it. And you set it up again every single time you play, instead of walking into the room and throwing.

None of that matters for five matches a month. All of it matters if darts is a most-evenings thing, if you have a dedicated board on a wall, or if anyone else in the house wants to play without borrowing your phone.

Once you have decided you want autoscoring properly, there are three real options in the UK right now. Lens with Plus at £59.99 a year and no hardware; a self-built or shop-built camera setup, which is what we sell, from £299.98 once; or Winmau’s Autodarts X at £449, which you can pre-order now for dispatch from 20 October 2026.

Autodarts X is a genuinely well-made piece of kit — four cameras and integrated lighting in one clamp-on unit, fitted without drilling. We are not going to tell you it is overpriced or that our detection beats it, because we have not tested one. What we can tell you is that it is not available yet, and that a DIY setup is explicitly supported by the platform: "Custom DIY setups" is listed in Autodarts’ own app alongside X and Vantage as a supported hardware path.

Install the app and score a few legs with Lens this week. It is free, it takes ten minutes, and it answers the real question — do you actually enjoy playing with automatic scoring, or was the maths part of the fun?

If the answer is that you loved it and immediately wished it were permanent, that is the moment hardware makes sense, and £299.98 once will serve you for years with nothing ongoing. If the answer is that it was a nice novelty for an evening, the free plan is genuinely all you need and we would rather you kept your money.

We would far rather sell one kit to someone who knows they want it than three to people who find out later that they did not.