What a research terminal’s free plan leaves out
This guide is about the gap between a free plan and a paid plan on a research or charting site. It uses two pricing pages that were captured: Koyfin’s and TradingView’s. It is for someone who is about to assume the free column includes the history, the alerts, or the exports they need.
Koyfin’s pricing page, on the monthly setting, shows $0, $39, $79, and $209. Premium at $79 is described for investors analyzing markets and portfolios. Advisor Core at $209 is described for advisors who need reporting and a basic custodian integration. A cookie notice covers the names and the feature rows of the $0 and $39 columns in the capture. This guide therefore does not list what the free plan includes feature by feature. The visible fact is that a $0 column exists next to paid columns. The paid columns cost more because Koyfin is selling a difference. The difference itself has to be read on the live page once the cookie notice is dismissed, not invented here to make the free plan sound either empty or complete.
TradingView’s pricing page, with annual billing selected, shows a free plan at $0 with no credit card requested in the hero, and paid plans at $12.95, $29.95, $59.95, and $199.95 a month, each labeled billed annually. The limits that usually separate those rows — charts per tab, indicators, alerts — sit below the prices in a full pricing table. They are not in the capture used for the review, so this guide does not assign “five indicators” or “twenty alerts” to Essential. What it will say is that the free plan and the $12.95 plan are different rows, and that $12.95 is a monthly equivalent under annual billing, which implies about $155.40 a year, not twelve separate $12.95 charges unless the page says so.
How a free plan misleads a buyer
A free plan is a good place to learn the screen. It is a bad place to assume the export, the history, or the alert count you will rely on in a month. The honest sequence is to name the one record you need — a decade of financials, an alert that fires overnight, a custodian file — and find that record’s row in the pricing table. If the row is blank or locked on the free column, the price of the plan that unlocks it is the real price. Koyfin’s $0 card cannot be described, from this capture, as including or excluding a ten-year history. The cookie panel is in the way. Saying otherwise would be filling a covered cell.
The same discipline applies to the $39 column, whose name is also covered. Calling it Plus, or describing its feature set from an older memory of the site, would not match the image. The prices that are safe are the ones you can see: $0, $39, $79, $209 on the monthly view. Advisor Pro is cut off and its price is omitted on purpose.
Paid plans are not advice fees
None of these prices is a percent of an investment account. Fidelity Go’s 0.35% above $25,000, Vanguard’s approximate 0.15% net advisory fee, and Schwab’s $0 advisory fee are managed-account prices. TradingView’s $12.95 and Koyfin’s $79 can sit on the same household budget and still be different purchases. A person can have a Schwab Intelligent Portfolios account, pay no advisory fee, and still pay TradingView for charts. The free TradingView row may be enough. The way to know is the limit table, not the fact that the advisory fee was zero.
Mintcanopy does not rank the free plans. A $0 cell next to a $209 cell is not a judgment that the free product is a toy or that the expensive product is thorough. It is a pricing page. The next click is to clear the cookie notice on Koyfin, read the feature row you care about, and flip TradingView’s billing toggle if you do not intend to pay annually. The screenshots remain pictures of the pages as captured, including the parts they hide.
A check a reader can repeat
1. Open Koyfin’s pricing page and set the same toggle the screenshot uses, which is monthly. Read the prices you can see without guessing at a covered column. The capture shows $0, $39, $79, and $209.
2. Dismiss the cookie notice before you copy a feature row. In the capture, that notice covers the names of the $0 and $39 plans. A feature you cannot see is not a feature this guide will assign.
3. Read Premium’s card at $79 and Advisor Core’s card at $209 as they are written: analysis for investors on one, reporting and basic custodian integration for advisors on the other. The $130 gap is the price gap between those two visible cards, not a quality score.
4. Leave Advisor Pro’s price unstated if the column is cut off, which it is in the capture. Scroll the live page if you need that plan. Do not finish a half-visible number.
5. Open TradingView’s pricing page and note which billing toggle is selected. The review capture is annual. Essential reads $12.95 a month, billed annually. The implied year is about $155.40. Confirm the yearly total on the page if it prints one.
6. Do not copy indicator or alert counts from memory. They sit lower on TradingView’s page than the capture goes. Scroll if the limit is the reason you would pay.
7. Keep these software prices away from advisory fees. Fidelity Go’s 0.35%, Vanguard’s approximate 0.15% net, and Schwab’s $0 advisory fee are percents of an account or an explicit zero. Koyfin and TradingView bill in dollars for the software.
8. Name the one record you need, such as a long history, an overnight alert, or a custodian file, and find that row. The free column is only sufficient when that row is included. The price of the first plan that includes it is the price that matters.
9. Flip Koyfin’s annual toggle and TradingView’s monthly toggle before you pay if you will not be billed the way the screenshot is billed. A monthly equivalent under annual billing is not the month-to-month price.
10. Treat the screenshot as a dated picture. If a card moves, the live pricing URL is the contract. Mintcanopy is not ranking the free plans against the paid ones beyond the dollars the pages print.