A subscription price answers one question: what the vendor charges. It does not answer what it costs to run the thing, and the gap between those two numbers is routinely two to five times. Below is every line that sits underneath, what it typically runs to, and why it is missing from the page where you formed your price expectation.
The 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.
In the calculator this is the “Platform licence” field. NinjaTrader's free tier is $0 and recovers it per trade instead; the monthly lease is around $99.
02
Market data feed
$25 – $70 / mo
Real-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.
In the calculator this is the “Market data feed” field. Real-time exchange data. Not included with a platform licence.
03
Server or VPS
$30 – $60 / mo
Anything 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.
In the calculator this is the “Server or VPS” field. Only if the strategy must run when your own machine is off.
04
Exchange & routing fees
varies with volume
Commissions, 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.
In the calculator this is the “Exchange & routing fees” field. Per-trade costs averaged to a month. Where free platform tiers move the cost to.
Ranges describe how this category is sold and are not quoted from any one vendor. Where a figure has not been read off a vendor’s own page and dated, this site does not publish it as a price.
Frequently asked questions
Are these costs actually hidden?
Not in the sense of being concealed — each one is documented somewhere, and three of the four are billed by a third party rather than by the software vendor at all. What makes them a trap is placement. They are never on the page where a buyer forms a price expectation, so the comparison happens on a number that was never the real one.
Which of the four catches people out most often?
The market-data feed, because it is the least intuitive. A buyer reasonably assumes that paying for a trading platform includes the prices the platform displays, and it does not — real-time exchange data is a separate subscription, and a strategy cannot run on the delayed feed that comes free. It is also the line a vendor is most comfortable omitting, since it genuinely is somebody else's invoice.
Does a free platform tier actually save money?
Sometimes, and it depends entirely on how much the system trades. A free tier does not absorb the licence cost, it converts it into a per-trade surcharge. For a strategy that takes a few positions a week that is a clear saving; for one that trades intraday at volume the surcharge can exceed what the monthly lease would have been. It moves the cost from a line you can see to one you cannot until the statement arrives.
Should trading capital be counted as a cost?
No. Money in your trading account remains yours — it is exposed to risk, which is a different thing from being spent. A recommended starting balance belongs in a discussion of whether you can run a system at all, never in its monthly cost. Any comparison that folds capital into a price is inflating the figure.
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