Scope, build, cost, and where we’re honest with you
No price list, no templates, no promises about profit. Just a clear way of turning what you want into working software, and a straight answer about what that takes.
- 01
You tell us what you want built
Your market, your broker or platform, and what the system should do. A rough idea is fine, the shaping happens next.
- 02
We ask the questions that make it real
A short set of specific questions turns a rough idea into a buildable scope. No estimate we gave before this would be anything but invented.
- 03
You get a real estimate and timeline
A fixed fee and a realistic schedule for exactly what you need, including the data or infrastructure it genuinely requires, and the parts it doesn’t.
- 04
We build, with checkpoints
You see progress and can course-correct as it takes shape, rather than waiting for one big reveal at the end.
- 05
We deliver, and support it
Every project includes a month of support after delivery, for the edge cases that only show up against a live market.
The questions we’ll ask
These are the questions that turn a rough idea into a real scope, cost and timeline. Having your answers ready makes the first conversation far more useful, and none of them commit you to anything.
- Which market and instruments, equities, futures, options, forex, crypto?
- Which broker or platform, and do you already have an account?
- Is the strategy logic already defined, or still taking shape?
- How often does it trade, and does latency actually matter for it?
- What data does it need, end-of-day, snapshot, or true tick?
- What are the risk rules, position sizing, exposure limits, stops?
- One account, or several at once with per-account limits?
- Does it run attended, or fully unattended and hands-off?
- Where should it run, your machine, a server, the cloud?
- Do you want to own the source code outright?
- What’s the timeline you’re working to?
The honest gap between a backtest and live trading
Anyone can make a backtest look good on a clean afternoon. What decides whether a system survives a live market is the engineering underneath, and it’s most of the real work: data gaps and bad ticks; partial fills, rejections and rate limits; recovering cleanly from a disconnection without double-sending orders; time zones, holidays and contract rollovers; and the gap between a backtest and a live fill, slippage, look-ahead bias and real costs. We build for these from the start, and we’ll tell you where your idea is most exposed to them. Our guide to the edge cases that separate a demo from a live trading system goes through them one by one. Data is part of that conversation too, see market-data engineering for how we size it to the strategy without over-buying.
Cost, time & ownership
- What does a project cost?
- There’s no price list, and any number given before we understand your requirement would be invented. You send us what you want built; we ask clarifying questions; then you get a real estimate. Like buying a car, a Toyota and a BMW are both “a car”, and the price depends on what you actually need.
- How long does a build take?
- Anywhere from about ten days to several months, depending entirely on what’s being built. One strategy, one broker, rules already clear, around ten days. A multi-broker, multi-account platform with a dashboard takes longer.
- Do I own the source code?
- You can own it outright with a full licence, yours to keep and modify, by us or by anyone you choose. That option costs an additional 30% of the project cost.
- How are you paid? Do you take a share of my trading?
- No. We charge a fixed fee for the work we do. We don’t take a cut of your trading, we don’t manage money, and we’re not a fund. Whatever your system does in the market is entirely yours.