How much does a trading bot cost, and what drives the price
Why a bot cannot be priced before the strategy is analysed, how a MetaTrader expert advisor differs from a trading platform, and how development is paid for.
The short answer: nobody can honestly quote a price before the strategy has been analysed. Not because it is a secret, but because the cost is driven less by the trading idea itself than by everything around it: the venue, order execution, protection against errors and how the bot will live on a server. The same strategy can cost several times more or less depending on those details.
Below is what the price is made of, where a simple expert advisor ends and a full platform begins, and how payment works.
Why nobody quotes a price straight away
“Buy the breakout, exit on a trailing stop” fits on one line. But for a bot to trade the way you do, every step needs an unambiguous answer:
- what exactly counts as a breakout — a candle close, a touch of the level, a spike in volume;
- at what price to enter, and what to do if the order is only partly filled;
- how to manage the position if the connection to the exchange drops mid-trade;
- what to do on a gap, a trading halt or a clearing session.
Until those questions are answered, any quoted price is a guess. A developer either builds in a margin for the unknown and quotes high, or quotes low and asks for more later. Neither helps the client.
What the cost is made of
The venue
An expert advisor for MetaTrader 5 runs inside the broker’s terminal and uses its infrastructure: quotes, order execution and charts are already there. A bot that talks to an exchange directly through its API has to do all of that itself — connect, receive data, track orders and recover from failures. The difference in the amount of work is several-fold.
Strategy complexity
One instrument on one timeframe is one job. A portfolio of a dozen instruments with capital allocation and shared limits is a different one entirely.
Execution
A market order on a signal is simple. Limit orders that get moved, partial fills, splitting large volumes, trading on several venues at once — each of these adds logic that has to be written and tested.
Risk management and error protection
Position sizing, stop losses, a daily loss limit, a stop on abnormal prices, protection against sending the same order twice. None of this is visible while things go well, and it is the most dangerous place to cut corners.
Infrastructure
A server that runs the bot around the clock, a trade log, Telegram alerts and monitoring: is the process alive, is the exchange connected, do the bot’s positions still match the positions in the account.
Interface
A bot used by one person often needs nothing more than a settings file and alerts. A control panel is a separate piece of work. And if the bot becomes a product for other users, with sign-up and subscriptions, it is a standalone application.
An expert advisor and a platform are different projects
An expert advisor for MetaTrader 5 and a trading platform with a commercial application are different projects, both in scope and in price. Comparing their cost makes as much sense as comparing the price of a kitchen refit with building a house.
What every project shares is the analysis of the idea. That is why bots for 40–50 thousand roubles are not of interest to me: a budget like that leaves no room to analyse the strategy, and without that analysis you get a bot that does something other than what you intended.
Why analysing the idea is a separate stage
Analysis turns the idea into a specification: precise rules, the list of venues, failure scenarios, acceptance criteria. This is often where it turns out the strategy has pitfalls that cost money — or that in its current form it simply is not viable.
If it turns out the idea is better left unbuilt, you learn that before development — not after the bot has been written, launched and failed to do what was expected of it.
How development is paid for
- I quote the price and timeline after the analysis and fix them in the specification. As long as the task stays the same, so does the price.
- The project is split into stages. Before the work starts you pay for the first stage upfront; the rest are paid as the work goes on.
- For three months after delivery I fix, free of charge, any bugs in the work done to the specification.
- If something critical fails — trading stops or orders go wrong — I step in within 4 hours, day or night.
All the terms are collected on the Pricing policy page.
What to prepare for the first conversation
The more precise the description, the faster the analysis:
- the rules of the strategy — in your own words, but step by step;
- the venue and broker you trade with or want to trade with;
- how you trade today: by hand, on signals, on indicators;
- what bothers you about the current process — late entries, discipline, lack of time;
- backtest results, if you have any, and the data they were produced on.
If the strategy only exists in your head so far, that is fine — many projects start exactly there. See what building a trading bot involves, or get in touch.