[Pricing] Vibe-Trading Pricing: What the Free Tier Covers, and Why the Paid Tier Is Quote-Only

Vibe-Trading is an open-source AI trading agent — “open source” means the code is public and free to copy under the MIT License, a permissive license that also allows commercial use without paying anyone. It turns plain-English instructions into backtested trading strategies and portfolio analysis across stocks, crypto, and forex, covering US, Hong Kong, A-share, and other markets. The headline question for anyone checking its pricing is simple: how much of this is actually free, and is the free tier worth using before you consider paying for more? Short answer: almost everything you’d touch day one is free. The only thing with a price tag doesn’t have a price tag — you have to ask for one.

What the free, open-source build actually includes

Because the whole project is MIT-licensed, running it yourself on your own machine or a GitHub-hosted copy costs nothing beyond your own hosting. You install it via PyPI (Python’s package installer) or Docker, and that’s it — no account, no sign-up wall, no feature gate behind a login.

Illustration: While the open-source core is free, unlocking advanced data hits a wall with no public pricing.

Once it’s running, the free build includes:

• A full interactive command-line interface and web UI, both fully usable with no limits.
• A backtesting engine (it replays historical data to show how a strategy would have performed) covering stocks, futures, crypto, and forex.
• 452 pre-built quantitative factors in what the project calls its “Alpha Zoo” — ready-made signals you can plug into a strategy instead of writing them from scratch.
• 18 free data sources baked in with no setup required: Eastmoney, Sina, Yahoo Finance, Stooq, CCXT, and others. No API key needed — an API key is just a password-like credential some data providers require before they’ll hand over data.
• A handful of additional sources — Finnhub, Alpha Vantage, Tiingo, FMP — that you can also connect for free, but you’ll need to register for your own free API key with each of those providers directly; Vibe-Trading doesn’t supply one for you.
• 16 messaging adapters, including Telegram, Discord, and Slack, so the agent can send alerts or reports to channels you already use.
• Bilingual support (English and Chinese), and no watermark on anything it produces.

There’s no usage cap, no trial period, and no feature held back for a future upgrade. For a solo trader or a small team building and testing strategies, this is the entire toolkit.

The paid add-on: 63+ sources, but no listed price

The one commercial piece is called QVeris — an add-on data and risk-calculation package. Buying QVeris credits (prepaid access units you purchase to unlock usage) is how you get past the 18 free sources to the full 63+ source catalog, plus some advanced risk-calculation tools that aren’t in the free build.

Here’s the catch: there is no published price. Not a monthly figure, not a per-credit rate, not an annual plan — nothing. The official GitHub page and its Chinese-language mirror both describe QVeris as available, but neither lists what it costs. The billing model is, in effect, “contact us for a quote.” If you want QVeris, you email or message the HKUDS team directly and negotiate from there.

That makes the standard “monthly vs. annual” comparison impossible here — there’s no monthly price or annual price to compare, because there’s no public price point to start from. If you’re the kind of buyer who wants to see a number before you reach out, this tool doesn’t give you one up front.

When paying is not worth it

Given that the free tier already ships 18 data sources, 452 pre-built factors, and a full backtest engine, paying for QVeris only makes sense in a narrow case: you specifically need one of the other 45+ data sources that QVeris unlocks, or you need its advanced risk-calculation tools, and the free sources genuinely don’t cover your market or asset.

For everyone else, paying is not worth pursuing yet — mainly because there’s nothing to evaluate. You can’t compare QVeris against a competitor’s US$20/month tier when QVeris has no listed number at all. The sane move is to build and test with the free 18 sources first, hit an actual gap, and only then reach out for a quote — rather than requesting pricing on spec for a feature you may never need.

🔍 AMPM exclusive check

We went past the README’s bullet points and checked whether the numbers hold up and whether a public QVeris price exists anywhere outside the main repo. We checked the official GitHub repo, the separate Chinese-language mirror repo, and looked for any linked pricing page, docs site, or order form. There isn’t one. This isn’t a case of a hidden pricing page we found and the vendor didn’t surface — there is simply no public price for QVeris anywhere in the project’s public materials, on either language version of the repo. The free-tier counts (18 built-in data sources, 452 Alpha Zoo factors, 16 messaging adapters) matched what’s listed on both repos, with no discrepancy. So the one gap worth flagging isn’t a number we caught that the vendor got wrong — it’s the absence of a number at all. Verified 2026-09-27.

☀️ AMO, the budget-minded cat

AMO only cares about one thing: is free enough, and is paying worth it? For Vibe-Trading, free is doing almost all the work. You get 452 ready-made quant factors, 18 no-key-needed data sources, a full backtest engine across four asset classes, and 16 alert channels — all for the cost of running the software yourself, which is to say, free. That’s a lot of tooling before you’d ever hit a wall.

The wall, when it comes, is specific: you need one of the other 45+ data sources QVeris unlocks (63+ total minus the 18 free ones), or you need its advanced risk-calculation layer, and none of the free sources or the optional free-with-your-own-API-key sources (Finnhub, Alpha Vantage, Tiingo, FMP) cover it. Until that exact situation hits, AMO says don’t bother reaching out — there’s no listed price to budget against anyway, and the free tier has no artificial cap pushing you toward upgrading. AMO’s rule of thumb here: spend zero dollars until you can name the specific data source or risk metric you’re missing, then ask QVeris for a quote for that specific gap — not for the package in general.

Verdict: who should use it, who should skip it

Use it if: you want a free, self-hosted AI trading agent with a genuinely large built-in toolkit — hundreds of pre-built factors, multi-asset backtesting, and no artificial limits — and you’re comfortable running Python or Docker yourself.

Skip it, or at least hold off on QVeris, if: you need guaranteed, published pricing before you commit to a workflow, or you need enterprise procurement to see a number without a sales conversation. Also skip the paid layer specifically if your trading universe is already covered by the 18 free sources or the four optional free-with-API-key providers — there’s nothing QVeris adds for you yet.

Written: 2026-10-08 Price last verified: 2026-09-27 Tool last health-checked: 2026-10-08

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📎 Sources

All prices and quotas in this article come from AMPM’s verified dataset for Vibe-Trading (last verified 2026-09-27); primary sources:

• https://github.com/HKUDS/Vibe-Trading

🐾 Meet the cats: AMO and PIMI

AMPM is an independent AI-tool pricing watchdog tracking official prices worldwide. Our motto: ask before you subscribe. Two cats argue every tool from two sides:

• ☀️ AMO — the budget-minded cat. Always asks: is the free tier enough, and is paying actually worth it?
• 🌙 PIMI — the performance-minded cat. Cares about whether it works well, fast, and gets your job done.

When they are done arguing, you know whether to pay. Every number is checked by us, with the verification date at the end.

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