The Free Plan Is Enough

Nothing about a chart has to be paid for while you are learning to read one. You have just watched the window this whole course builds inside.

That is a checkable claim, and this lesson is where you check it.

So: what the free plan holds, where it stops, and which of the two companies ever asks you for money.

Nobody asks for a card

The plan is called Basic, it is a plan rather than a trial, it has no expiry date, and no card goes in anywhere.

Here is the part that matters for currencies. Foreign exchange prices are real-time on it. Share and futures prices arrive late unless somebody pays for the feed.

Your platform is the software you look at the market through. It draws the chart, keeps every line you put on it, runs your indicators and sends your alerts. Your broker holds your money and carries out your instructions. The same company can do both jobs, and they stay two jobs.

One laptop, one chart, one table you already own. That is the whole kit.

What the plan actually holds

These are the allowances at the time of writing, and all of them are the company's to change. One saved chart layout. Two indicators on it, one watchlist of thirty markets, and three price alerts. Five thousand candles of history below the daily interval.

Easy to miss, and included: seventeen chart types, the drawing tools, the community script library, simulated trading and the replay tool.

Put that question to anything that wants a card. The chart company's honest answer here is nothing at all. Anybody answering differently is a broker, and a broker is a conversation for the book.

That last one only bites below a day. Set the interval to a day and the platform shows every candle it holds. Shorten the candle and five thousand sounds a lot less generous. The store is fixed, so a shorter candle spends it faster.

Move the interval and watch that same store of five thousand shrink into months. The chart this course builds is a daily one, so it never meets the cap at all.

The two limits you will feel

Two indicators and three alerts bite first. Instruments built out of the same numbers agree with each other whether or not they are telling you anything, so a cap of two stops you stacking four lenses that repeat one reading.

• Advertising, on the charts and across the site

• No customer support of any kind below a paid plan

• One chart to a tab, so nothing sits side by side

• No market data subscriptions at all, which bites on shares and futures and leaves currencies alone

Your work is not on your laptop

Sign in and everything you build is held on the company's own machines rather than on the thing in front of you.

Build it on a borrowed laptop in the evening, open the phone app on the way to work, and the same chart is waiting with the same lines on it. A machine that dies takes nothing with it.

Two things before leaning on that. Reaching any of it wants a connection, and all of it sits under one company's terms, so it goes when the account goes.