Free trading bots

Free is a cost model, not a price

Bot	Type	Price	Trade fee	Free tier	Trial	Backtest	Paper	Exchanges	US
Freqtrade	Self-hosted	free	-	yes	-	yes	yes	11	US
Hummingbot	Self-hosted	free	-	yes	-	yes	yes	50	US
Bitsgap	Cloud platform	$23-149/mo	-	yes	7 days, no card	yes	yes	17	US
Jesse	Self-hosted	$0-1599/mo	-	yes	-	yes	yes	12	US
OctoBot	Self-hosted	$0-29.99/mo	-	yes	7 days, no card	yes	yes	12	US
ZI Zignaly	Copy trading	unknown	-	yes	-	-	-	-	-
Coinrule	Cloud platform	0.02% of volume	-	yes	-	-	-	20	US
Superalgos	Self-hosted	free	-	yes	-	yes	yes	15	US
Cryptohopper	Cloud platform	$29-129/mo	-	yes	3 days, no card	yes	yes	16	US
PI Pionex	Exchange-native	0.05% per trade	0.05% per trade	yes	-	-	-	-	US
WunderTrading	Cloud platform	$0-100/mo	-	yes	7 days, no card	-	yes	18	US
Altrady	Cloud platform	$30-97/mo	-	yes	5 days, no card	yes	yes	17	US
Passivbot	Self-hosted	free	-	yes	-	yes	yes	8	US
MI Mizar	Cloud platform	0.1% of volume	-	yes	-	yes	-	10	-
Binance Trading Bots	Exchange-native	free	-	yes	-	-	-	-	-
BI Bitget Copy Trading	Copy trading	unknown	-	yes	-	-	-	-	-
BY Bybit Copy Trading	Copy trading	unknown	-	yes	-	-	-	-	-
OKX Trading Bots	Exchange-native	free	-	yes	-	-	-	-	-
GA Gate.io Trading Bots	Exchange-native	free	-	yes	-	-	-	-	-
KuCoin Trading Bots	Exchange-native	free	-	yes	-	-	-	-	-
Bitget Trading Bots	Exchange-native	free	-	yes	-	-	-	-	-
BY Bybit Trading Bots	Exchange-native	free	-	yes	-	-	-	-	-
TR TradeSanta	Cloud platform	$14-70/mo	-	yes	14 days, no card	-	-	8	US
AX Axiom	DEX / Telegram sniper	0.7% per trade	0.7% per trade	yes	-	-	-	-	-
Banana Gun	DEX / Telegram sniper	1% per trade	1% per trade	yes	-	-	-	-	-
BullX	DEX / Telegram sniper	1% per trade	1% per trade	yes	-	-	-	-	-
PH Photon	DEX / Telegram sniper	0.9% per trade	0.9% per trade	yes	-	-	-	-	-
GM GMGN	DEX / Telegram sniper	1% per trade	1% per trade	yes	-	-	-	-	-
Maestro	DEX / Telegram sniper	1% per trade	1% per trade	yes	-	-	-	-	-
TR Trojan	DEX / Telegram sniper	0.9% per trade	0.9% per trade	yes	-	-	-	-	-
BO BONKbot	DEX / Telegram sniper	1% per trade	1% per trade	yes	-	-	-	-	-

Live values from our database - details and caveats in each review. "-" = not documented.

31 bots match the no-subscription filter on this page - but they bill through four different doors, and picking the wrong door costs more than a subscription. The figure below is the annual bill at $10,000 monthly traded volume:

• Exchange-native: the software is a feature of the account. You pay the venue's trading fee per fill - 0.05% at Pionex[3], 0.1% (0.075% with BNB) at Binance[4] - and nothing else, ever. This is the only lane where free is genuinely free at scale.
• Open source: the license is free; the hosting is not. Freqtrade states minimum hardware of 2GB RAM / 1GB disk / 2 vCPU[1]; a $5-20 VPS plus your ops time is the real price. Hummingbot, OctoBot, Passivbot, Superalgos and Jesse are in the same boat.
• Freemium: free until the limits bite - bot counts, exchange connections, monthly volume, backtesting reserved for paid plans. WunderTrading's free tier (one bot per type) is the most usable; Cryptohopper's Explorer tier is a demo with a real-market feed[5].
• Per-trade: the sniper lane (Photon, Axiom, BullX, Trojan, Banana Gun, GMGN, BONkbot) charges 0.7-1% per trade. That is 7-10x a Binance taker fee on every fill. The software is free the way a taxi meter is free.

The freemium throttle, quantified

31 of the 31 bots here are free or carry a free tier, and 6 add a trial window of up to 14 days. The pattern to understand before choosing: free tiers are calibration tools. Their limits (one bot, limited connections, no backtesting) are designed to surface value, not to host a production strategy. Two failure modes follow, both self-inflicted: paying nothing while running a strategy you cannot backtest, or compensating for the one-bot limit by stacking aggressive settings into it. The calculator-first alternative is boring and effective - price the paid tier against the free tier's realistic output using the bot cost calculator, then decide.

The free community evidence is real, though. The best-known free-bot test - the 78-vs-1000-grid run on Pionex's native bots - produced annualized figures that professional platforms would advertise, before fees[6]. Free software on a free exchange feature, tested properly, is a serious setup; it is not a lesser lane.

Which free lane for which case

Ranging and accumulation, no keys, no bills: Pionex (0.05%[3]) and Binance/OKX/Gate native bots. Pick this if your strategies are grid/DCA shaped and you accept one exchange's markets.

Strategy development and full control: Freqtrade (Python, backtesting, dry-run, 11 exchanges[1]) or Hummingbot (market making, 318 connectors[2]). Free like a puppy: the initial cost is nothing, the ongoing care is the price.

Cloud features on a budget: WunderTrading's free tier for webhook-driven single bots, then its $10-25/mo steps. TradeSanta's 14-day trial is the longest full-featured window on this page - enough to actually test a strategy, not just the dashboard.

Memecoin sniping: genuinely free software, but read the [per-trade fee section](#free-is-a-cost-model-not-a-price) again before assuming that makes it cheap. The sniper lane carries that category's full risk ledger.

The exchange-native fee floor, in numbers

The reason exchange-native bots anchor this page: their fee schedule is the floor under every other lane's pricing. Pionex bills 0.05% per side on spot[3]; Binance's regular tier is 0.1% per side, 0.075% with the BNB discount[4]. On a strategy that turns over its capital 50 times a month, that fee line alone is 2.5-5% of capital monthly - the entire budget every subscription platform competes against. When a paid platform promises "better execution", the honest comparison is against this floor, not against zero.

API capacity is the second floor dimension. Exchange-native bots consume no personal API quota at all; cloud and self-hosted bots trade against venue rate limits and key handling rules that venues like OKX document per endpoint[7]. Free tiers of cloud platforms often sit on the same rate limits as paid tiers - the throttle there is feature-gating, not capacity.

Statistics that frame the free lane

• 31 bots pass this page's no-subscription filter; 6 of them are open source and 23 need no third-party keys at all.
• 6 of them add a formal trial window (up to 14 days) - the freemium lanes' real "free" is usually the trial, not the tier.
• 42% document US availability - free does not mean globally available; jurisdiction is still a hard filter.
• Median entry price across the paid lanes that share this universe: ~$26/mo/mo - the number a "free" setup saves, minus the fees and ops it does not.
• The how bots work guide explains the execution loop every one of these shares; the bot-vs-hodl guide measures what automation actually adds over passive holding.

Warnings

• "Free bot" is the standard lure of phishing clones. Fake bot dashboards harvest exchange API keys - the FTC's crypto scam patterns describe the funnel[8]. Verify domains character by character; our scam-check tool screens bot-branded sites.
• Freemium caps are strategy-changing, not cosmetic. If your plan caps connections mid-strategy, the bot can hold state you cannot manage from the free tier. Know the exact caps before funding, not after.
• OSS on a VPS inherits the ops bill. No auto-updates, no vendor monitoring: an unpatched Freqtrade box with API keys in config.json is an attack surface. The API key security guide is mandatory reading for that route.
• Per-trade fees compound silently. On the sniper lane, a 1% round trip needs a 1%+ edge per flip to break even - before slippage and priority fees. That fee line, not the token, is what most participants lose to.
• Fee tiers change. Binance's BNB discount, Pionex's flat rate and exchange promotions are all current as of our capture dates[3][4]; verify on the venue's own fee page before computing your edge.

Reading the lane honestly

The subscription-free universe is where marketing and reality diverge most. A paid platform sells orchestration; a free lane gives you raw mechanics and asks you to supply the discipline. Three honest readings help: first, the free evidence base is real - community tests on free native bots produced professional-grade annualized numbers[6], and OSS frameworks power serious operations. Second, the throttle points are real - freemium caps, OSS ops, per-trade fees - and they bite exactly when your strategy starts working. Third, "free" attracts predatory clones more than any other pitch; the scam-pattern guide and the FTC's patterns[8] are the filter to run before any download.

If you are deciding between this lane and a subscription, the sequence that works: start exchange-native at small size, add an OSS framework if you need strategy depth, and only pay a subscription when you can name the specific feature you are paying for - cross-exchange orchestration, webhook plumbing, or marketplace signals. That order keeps every invoice earned.

One more honesty note on the sniper lane, because it skews every average on this page: 31 includes the wallet bots, and their per-trade fees mean the "free" label is technically true and practically misleading for them. If your interest is sniping, budget for the fee line first - the sniper lane prices each bot per trade with the fee stack broken out.