StrategyQuant pricing for the Starter, Professional and Ultimate licenses

StrategyQuant X (often written SQX) generates trading strategies by random generation or genetic evolution, tests them, and exports the survivors as source code for MetaTrader 4 and 5, TradeStation, MultiCharts and NinjaTrader 8. We read its pricing page, including every collapsed accordion and FAQ answer, plus its download page and data subscription page on October 14, 2026. Every figure below is quoted from those pages unless we say the arithmetic is ours.

The payment-plan totals are our arithmetic, twelve times the monthly figure. All prices are in US dollars and exclude VAT, which the checkout adds by billing country.

How much more do the 12 monthly payments cost?

Twenty percent, on every license. Starter is $258 more on the plan, Professional $298 more and Ultimate $580 more. The pricing page gives two other numbers for the same thing. The toggle above the price cards says "Save 12 %" for the one-time payment, and the FAQ says "there is a 17% price increase when paid in installments". Neither matches the prices printed beside them: paying once saves 16.7% of the plan total, and the plan adds 20% to the one-time price.

The plan is also not a loan you can walk away from with something in hand. StrategyQuant says you get the full license immediately and "after completing all 12 payments, it becomes a lifetime license", and that you can cancel at any time, "though you would lose your license". Stop at month six on Starter and you have paid $774 for six months of use. If you are fairly sure you will keep the software, the one-time price is the better deal by $258 to $580. If you are not sure, the plan works as a paid extension of the 14-day trial, and that is a fair way to use it.

StrategyQuant Starter vs Professional vs Ultimate

The $200 between Starter and Professional buys the tools that decide whether a generated strategy is worth trading. All three licenses include the Builder, Retester, Improver, strategy editor, tick precision backtesting, a free forex, CFD and crypto data pack, a 56-lesson video course and an e-book. The differences are below.

Read the first two rows carefully before buying Starter. A strategy generator tries a very large number of rule combinations, and some will look excellent on past data by luck. Bailey, Borwein, Lopez de Prado and Zhu showed in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society in 2014 that with five years of daily data, about 45 independent variations are enough to expect one with an in-sample Sharpe ratio of 1 and no real edge. Robustness tests and walk-forward optimization are how you filter those out, and Starter is the one license sold without them. For most buyers Professional is the real entry price.

What StrategyQuant costs after the first year

A Starter or Professional license is "valid for lifetime", with "access to support and updates for one year since the purchase". A further year of support and updates "costs $300 USD". You can skip it and keep running the version you have. If you want each new build, Professional costs $1,490 in year one and $300 a year after that.

These columns are our arithmetic from StrategyQuant's listed prices. On software alone, Ultimate only becomes the cheaper license in year six. The picture changes if you trade stocks or futures, because the data that ships with every license covers forex, CFDs and crypto. Equities and futures data is a separate subscription: the complete intraday and end-of-day package is listed at $269 a year (struck through from $399), and end-of-day only at $139 a year. Add the complete package to Professional and you reach $2,897 after three years, three dollars under Ultimate, which includes that data for life. A stock or futures trader who expects to stay three years or more should price Ultimate first.

What an upgrade costs later

Buying low and upgrading costs more than buying the right license once. StrategyQuant lists "Upgrade full Professional to Ultimate for 1,900 USD", or 12 payments of $190, and Starter to Professional for $350, shown against $550 and arranged by email.

The totals are ours. One more condition applies to the payment plan: a Professional license "needs to be fully paid off even if you upgrade it", and if you also buy the upgrade in installments, "you will have two installment plans running at the same time".

License terms that change the real price

• Computers: "one license for one computer". You can move it by resetting the license, with a "limit of 5 self-resets" before you need support. Extra licenses for your own laptop or VPS are discounted on request by email.
• Resale: transferring a license to another person carries "a $300 Transfer fee", and "the new customer has to pay $300 Support & Updates extension fee". A used license therefore costs $600 on top of whatever the seller asks.
• Refunds: because of the trial, "purchases are generally non-refundable". Data subscriptions are stricter: "there are no refunds and all sales are final".
• Trial: the download page says "you can try the program for 14 days".
• Platform: the download page lists Windows, Mac and Linux builds and says it "runs on Windows 10/8.1/7, Mac, Linux, Windows Server".
• Discounts: students in daily study up to 26 years old "have 50% discount" on a new license, owners of a competing commercial tool "qualify for an additional discount", and group purchases are priced per request.

How many AI credits does a license include?

The page gives two answers. StrategyQuant's chat assistant, Q, runs on credits. The plan cards list 2,400 credits for Starter, 4,800 for Professional and 12,000 for Ultimate. The FAQ on the same page says the one-time allocation is "Starter: 1,200 credits", "Professional: 2,400 credits" and "Ultimate: 6,000 credits", exactly half. It also says a credit count "does not correspond to a fixed number of messages or generated strategies", and that more credits are sold as a package or a monthly plan once the included ones run out. If the assistant matters to you, ask support which allocation applies to your order before paying, and treat it as a metered extra.

Who should pay for StrategyQuant, and who should not

StrategyQuant earns its price if you trade forex, futures or CFDs systematically, want software to search for rules and stress-test them, and plan to run what you find as code on MetaTrader, TradeStation, MultiCharts or NinjaTrader. It is one of the few strategy generators with a Mac and a Linux build and a real trial, which is a clear advantage over Build Alpha, sold at $1,497 with no trial and for Windows only. For a platform where you write and test your own rules instead, WealthLab pricing starts at $399.95 a year.

It is the wrong purchase if you already have the idea and only need to know whether it has worked. Paying $1,490 and learning a generation workflow to check one rule on a stock or an ETF is a lot of machinery for a small question. Type the rule in plain English into our trading strategy tester and it runs in the browser on split- and dividend-adjusted daily data, with costs on every trade and a plain verdict against buy and hold. If you do want orders placed for you, our guide to automated trading platforms compares the tools that execute.