All-in cost method
What will it actually
cost you to run?
Not the sticker price.
Vendors quote the subscription. The bill is the subscription plus the platform licence, the market-data feed, the server it runs on and the routing fees — every month, before a strategy has made a dollar. Put your own figures in and the total updates. Nothing you type leaves the browser.
All-in, per month
$49
Same as the quoted price
- Quoted by the vendor
- $49
- Added by everything else
- $0
Nothing added. The quote is the whole bill.
Starting figures describe Hexgo, whose quoted price was verified against the vendor’s own page on 2026-08-13. What each line means
What the quote leaves out
Four line items that arrive after you have bought
None of these are hidden exactly — each is documented somewhere. They are simply never on the pricing page, so the number a buyer compares is not the number they pay.
Platform licence
$0 – $99 / moThe strategy runs inside a trading platform, and that platform is licensed separately from the strategy. A free tier usually exists, but it recovers the cost as a surcharge on every trade, which is cheaper only if you trade rarely. A product that requires the leased tier has effectively added a hundred dollars a month to its own price without changing the number on its pricing page.
Market data feed
$25 – $70 / moReal-time exchange data is not bundled with a platform licence, and an automated strategy cannot run on the delayed feed. This is the line most often missing from a comparison, because it is billed by a third party rather than by the vendor — which makes it easy to present as somebody else's problem.
Server or VPS
$30 – $60 / moAnything meant to trade while you sleep needs a machine that is awake. Where the vendor runs execution on its own infrastructure this line is genuinely zero; where it does not, it is yours to rent. Some products go further and expect a co-located server near the exchange, which is a materially larger lease and is almost never mentioned alongside the price.
Exchange & routing fees
varies with volumeCommissions, exchange fees and the per-trade surcharge that a free platform tier charges instead of a licence. This is the one line that scales with how much the system trades rather than sitting flat, so a high-frequency strategy on a free tier can quietly cost more than a quiet one on a leased tier.
Completed scorecard · 1 of 1
Hexgo
The quoted price and the all-in price are the same $49, which is the whole reason it marks as high as it does on cost — there is no platform lease and no required co-located server to add underneath it. Coverage of all four CME index contracts in micro as well as full size is what makes it usable on a smaller account, since micros are the only way to trade index futures without position sizing that a single bad sequence would wipe out. Monitoring and automatic recovery are included rather than sold separately, which matters because unattended systems fail through disconnects and platform restarts far more often than through bad logic.
91
out of 100
- Quoted
- $49
- All-in / mo
- $49
- Platform
- NinjaTrader 8
- Added lines
- $0
We may earn a fee from links on this page. Disclosure
Frequently asked questions
Why is the quoted price not the real cost?
Because a strategy is only one of the things you have to pay for to run it. It executes inside a trading platform that is licensed separately, on real-time exchange data that is billed by a third party, often on a server you rent, and every trade it places carries a commission. None of those appear on the vendor's pricing page, and three of the four are not even billed by the vendor — which is what makes them easy to present as somebody else's problem.
Does this site store the figures I enter?
No. The calculator runs entirely in your browser, nothing is transmitted, and nothing is written to storage. Your cost structure is your own commercial position and there is no reason for this site to hold it. Reload the page and the fields reset to their defaults.
Why is only one product given a scorecard?
Because this site answers a cost question, not a which-is-best question. The calculator is the part meant to be used on any product you are considering. The scorecard is one worked example of the rubric applied end to end, and it is labelled one of one rather than dressed up as a wider survey.
What counts as the all-in monthly cost?
The subscription plus everything required to run it: the trading platform licence, the real-time market data feed, any server or VPS the strategy needs to stay running, and per-trade exchange and routing fees averaged to a month. Capital is not a cost — money in your trading account stays yours, so a recommended starting balance never belongs in this figure.
Does a lower all-in cost mean a product is better?
No. It means less has to be earned before you are even. Cost is the largest single component of the mark here, at 30 of 100, precisely because it is the one number that is knowable in advance — but a cheap system with no edge loses money more slowly rather than making it. Nothing on this site is scored on published returns, because a return quoted without its maximum drawdown and the period it covers is marketing rather than evidence.