Build your own algorithm, or license one?

A lot of people who find us ask the same question: why wouldn’t I just build my own trading algorithm?

It’s a fair question. So let’s actually price it out. What it costs to build one properly, how long it takes, and the one thing you can’t buy no matter how much you spend.

Year one: about $258,000

Let’s start with building it yourself, in-house.

First you need a quant developer, someone who can write and test trading code. Salary plus costs, that’s about 170 thousand dollars a year.

Then you need a dashboard, something that shows you positions, trades and performance. Building that runs about 70 thousand.

Then servers and market data, so it actually runs every day on clean data. Call it 18 thousand a year.

Add it up and year one is about 258 thousand dollars. And that’s if everything goes right the first time.

Faster to start. Not cheaper.

Okay, so what if you skip the hiring and pay an agency to build it for you?

You’re usually looking at somewhere between 250 and 400 thousand dollars, and nine to twelve months before it’s trading live.

So it’s not cheaper. It just moves the headache to somebody else. And you’re still paying for servers, data and maintenance after it’s built.

Day one track record: zero years.

But here’s the real problem, and it’s not the money.

On the day your brand new algorithm goes live, its track record is zero years. You have a backtest, which is the system’s best guess at the past. You don’t have proof. You don’t know how it handles a real crash, a real sector flip, a real month like July 2026.

The only way to get that proof is time. Years of it. And you can’t buy time.

Strike’s record covers about six and a half years and 2,239 trades, through good markets and bad ones. That’s the thing you’re really licensing. Not just the code, but the years.

Skip the build. Keep the years.

So, build or license? Building costs about a quarter million dollars in year one, an agency costs about the same or more, and either way you start with zero years of proof.

If you’d rather start with a record that’s already been through good markets and bad, go to strikealgo.net and book a call. We’ll show you how licensing works and what it costs.

Why this matters if you’re considering Strike

Licensing gets you what money can’t buy: rules that have already lived through a pandemic rally, a bear market and a −22% month. On a call we’ll walk through how licensing works and what it costs, in writing.

Frequently asked questions