Why do I have to pay for live? Why this price? And other similar questions

Please read "The story behind Jesse's development" and "The live trade plugin is open for early access" articles for the explanation on the decision to make the live plugin a paid product, with a life-time license model, instead of other methods. In short: without monetization to finance the development, this project will die like many before (Like Gekko did). And I chose the simplest one for the time being.

But why is it that other bots like Freqtrade are worth $0 but Jesse costs more?

Just because open-source software is free to use, it doesn't mean it's worth $0. It is usually that way because the maintainers behind the project are working on it as a hobby and are not making a living on top of it. And of course, they are very generous. But we have seen multiple times in the past that such projects eventually shut down.

As the case for Jesse, to this day it offers a variety of outstanding features for free:

The main framework which supports importing and cleaning candles, the most advanced backtesting engine, optimization, the most complete indicators collection out there, extensive metrics, research utilities and many more features worth thousands of hours invested from the free time of the main developers and many contributors, is and will stay open source and free.

Why the paid live-trade plugin?

I started Jesse as a hedge-fund level trading framework, not merely a hobby project. I open-sourced it at the time because of my passion for open-source and it wasn't my source of income at the time. I used to work at trading firms, leaving very few hours per week for working on the community's needs. So I looked for releasing the live-trade plugin as a premium plugin so I can work full-time on Jesse. Nowadays, I spend my time trading for my own and developing such advanced software for everyone to use.

We give you everything you need to research and eventually develop a profitable strategy. Once you have that profitable strategy, you can take it and implement it using another software for live trading, or to contribute to Jesse's future developments and get yourself a license for live trading. For that, you'll need to contribute to the project.

Contribute how?

It's usually fair to say that you either have capital in your hands for contribution, or time (and love for the project). The choice is yours. The price of Jesse's live trade plugin is at the time of this writing only $800 for a lifetime license! But if for any reason, you cannot afford that, you're more than welcome to contribute some other way and get yourself 1-100% discounts:

OK, but $800 is expensive!

Cheap and expensive are relative words. Consider the value that you receive. Compare that to for example a Bloomberg terminal's $2k monthly subscription! Or how much finance courses are worth. Or monthly subscription-based bots that charge you that same amount for only a few months. Also, you have no privacy in there. Consider your secret strategies as shared strategies once you use a cloud subscription trading bot!

In fact, I purposely priced Jesse to be the most affordable bot among premium bots. Just do the calculation for the features you get and the period of the license.

I find $800 (or $1600 after the early-release period is over) to be very cheap considering how much a hedge fund usually has to pay me to develop such software for them. In fact, I'm often asked why am I not selling to businesses instead.

OK, I get that Jesse is worth it, but I cannot afford $800 at the moment

You are more than welcome to contribute and receive further discounts. Also, feel free to reach out to me and talk more about your situation.

How to get discounts?

As I mentioned I give 1-100% further discounts for contributions. You can find instructions and examples of it here.

Why not a cloud-based (SaaS) subscription model?

Please read this article's a section talking about the SaaS business model.

Why not offer a trial?

Please read this post.