Trade Ideas Pricing Explained: Every Plan, Add-On, and the Fine Print

Trade Ideas pricing produces a predictable first reaction: sticker shock. Up to $254 a month for trading software, when your broker's screener is free, feels indefensible — right up until you understand what the number actually contains, at which point it becomes a genuinely interesting value question that depends entirely on who you are as a trader.

This guide is the full breakdown: every plan, what's actually inside each tier (including the split that confuses the most buyers), the three add-ons, the annual billing math, the bundled costs most competitors bill separately, and the billing fine print that matters more than most reviews admit — including a refund policy you should know before you enter a card number. Prices below were verified against Trade Ideas' published pricing at the time of writing; current promotions can change the numbers, and the live figures are always on our deals page.

How much does Trade Ideas cost? Trade Ideas offers a free plan with delayed data and two paid tiers: The Core (Basic) at $127/month or $1,068/year, and The Apex (Premium) at $254/month or $2,136/year — annual billing works out to $89 and $178 per effective month respectively, roughly 30% below monthly rates. All plans include U.S. market data for non-professional subscribers, and three optional add-ons range from $17 to $49 per month.

Two structural notes before the tier-by-tier detail. First, annual billing is where the pricing design pushes you: it saves $456 a year on The Core and $912 on The Apex — roughly 30% off the monthly rate. Second, all paid plans bundle real-time U.S. market data for non-professional subscribers, with Trade Ideas paying the exchange fees. That's not a throwaway line: platforms that bill exchange data separately commonly add $40–60 a month, which means a meaningful slice of the Trade Ideas price is cost you'd pay somewhere regardless.

The free tier runs on delayed data, which makes it useless for live trading decisions and genuinely useful for exactly two things: learning the interface before you pay, and deciding whether the platform's whole approach suits you. You get the workspace, Stock Racing visualizations, picture-in-picture charts, and predefined alerts — enough to understand what the paid product would feel like, with a delay that removes any temptation to trade off it.

Pair it with the free live trading room — which streams every market day at no cost, no card required — and you can evaluate a surprising amount of the platform for zero dollars. That combination is the correct starting point for anyone unsure, and it's what our setup guide recommends before any subscription decision.

The Core — Trade Ideas' current name for the Basic plan — is the real-time tier. The headline difference from free is live data, and that single change is what makes the platform usable for actual trading: the scanning engine processes every tick as it happens, which is the entire point of an event-driven scanner.

What's inside: the full real-time scanning engine with the complete alert and filter library, charting (10 charts per screen), customizable layouts, the paper-trading demo account, in-app manual execution through Brokerage Plus with supported brokers, and access to the live trading room. That's a complete manual trading workflow — find it, chart it, practice it, execute it — with nothing AI-generated in the loop.

Who it genuinely fits: the discretionary trader who builds and runs their own scans (the recipes in our momentum scan guide all run on this tier), wants integrated execution, and has no interest in paying for AI signals they won't follow. If that's you, The Core is honestly sufficient, and upgrading "just in case" is how people end up paying for Holly signals they never trade.

What it lacks is precisely defined, and it's the next section.

The Apex — the Premium plan — is where every AI-branded feature and the validation machinery lives. The additions over The Core: all three Holly AI signal systems, the Money Machine autonomous momentum engine, OddsMaker backtesting, Smart Risk Levels on charts, curated Channel Bar strategy templates, automated strategy trading through Brokerage Plus, expanded workspace limits (20 charts per screen, unlimited watchlists), and cosmetic extras like the dark theme.

The clean way to think about the tier split: The Core finds what you ask for; The Apex adds machines that decide, test, and act. Holly generates ideas, OddsMaker validates them against history, and the automation layer executes without your hands — none of which exists on the lower tier.

This produces the one question that actually decides the tier choice, and it's worth answering honestly before you look at another feature list: will you use the AI signals or the backtester? If Holly's ideas or the scan-validate-automate pipeline is why you're buying the platform, The Apex is non-negotiable — those are its exclusive contents. If you'd trade your own scans manually and ignore the AI, the extra $127 a month buys you features you've already decided not to use. There is no middle tier, so this one question does nearly all the work.