Lifetime licenses

The model that priced maintenance out of existence

(no bots match right now - see the full comparison table.)

A trading bot is not a product you buy once - it is a maintenance contract with the world's fastest-moving exchange APIs. Lifetime pricing sold that contract as a one-time sale; the market has now priced it correctly. The sequence that ended the model, documented in our fact-checks:

• Gunbot - the last major vendor selling lifetime licenses - retired them and moved to a $29/month subscription; existing licenses remain valid for holders[1].
• HaasOnline sells cloud plans at $19.99-249.99/month (cheaper billed yearly or in BTC) with no lifetime tier[2].
• The subscription baseline across cloud platforms: 3Commas $15-105/mo annual[3], Bitsgap $23-149/mo, Cryptohopper $29-129/mo.

The figure's second line is the real cost curve. A subscription's flat line is a revenue stream that funds connector maintenance; a lifetime price is a payment history that ends. Every API break after the last purchase is funded by goodwill - and the 2025-26 period alone saw multiple breaking venue changes.

What existing holders should know

Your license is an asset with a decay rate, not a permanent win. Gunbot's statement that existing licenses remain valid[1] is the good case. The decay comes from exchange-side change: a license on a stalled build loses venues one API deprecation at a time. Practical holder rules: pin the version that works, watch the changelog, and value the license at roughly one year of replacement subscription (our figure) declining from there.

Do not let the sunk cost pick your stack. A held license is only worth using while its maintenance is real. If the vendor's cadence slips, the free-software route - Freqtrade at $0, maintained weekly[6] - plus a $5-20 VPS[5] out-features a frozen lifetime build within a year.

The pricing landscape the model left behind

0 platforms still match this page's lifetime filter in our tracking - effectively the held licenses, because 0-style free alternatives cover the functional ground differently. The current market offers three pricing models, all visible on this site: subscriptions ($14-149/mo across the cloud lanes[1][2][3]), volume and per-trade fees (Coinrule 0.02%, the sniper lane's 0.7-1%), and free software with an ops bill (Freqtrade plus a $4.54+/mo VPS[5][6]). The lifetime model was a fourth option; its extinction is a data point about what bot maintenance costs, not a pricing footnote.

The bot cost calculator prices the remaining models against your volume - which is the comparison the lifetime era never had to make, and the reason its disappearance is mostly a good thing for buyers.

Freemium deserves its own line in that comparison: Cryptohopper's free Pioneer tier (80 positions, 15 coins, 10-minute interval) shows how far a $0 entry now reaches[7]. The lifetime pitch once bought "freedom from subscriptions"; the market responded with free tiers, free software, and subscriptions that price maintenance honestly. Every model except the lifetime one now has a no-upfront-payment entry point - the buyer's leverage improved after the model died.

The mortality statistics behind the break-even

Our dead-platform tracking puts 2 platforms in the graveyard and 0 on the watch list - vendor mortality in this market is not a theoretical risk but the base rate. A lifetime purchase is an unsecured loan to the vendor, repaid in software updates. The 10.3-month break-even in our figure assumes the vendor keeps maintaining at least that long; the graveyard odds say discount everything beyond the first year. That is the arithmetic conclusion of the model's extinction: the subscription model did not win on price, it won on survival odds - and a surviving vendor at $29/mo[1] beats a buried one at any price.

For holders doing the final accounting, the checklist is short: confirm the vendor still ships changelog entries for your version[1]; confirm the exchanges you actually use still work on your build; and compute the remaining value as (months until your next forced upgrade) times $29 - minus the valuation you place on never filing a support ticket again. Holders in that positive-value zone should simply keep what they have; holders below it should migrate before the choice is made for them by an API deprecation. And if the migration day comes, the open-source hub rates the frameworks you would inherit - including how their maintenance cadence compares to the vendor you just left.

The pricing models that replaced it, compared

Three models now divide what lifetime pricing once bundled, and each prices a different truth. Subscriptions ($29/mo Gunbot[1], $19.99-249.99/mo HaasOnline[2], $15-105/mo 3Commas[3]) price ongoing maintenance honestly - and shift vendor-survival risk to the vendor, which is why they won. Volume and per-trade fees (Coinrule's 0.02%, the sniper lane's 0.7-1%) price usage - attractive at low activity, regressive at scale. Free software with an ops bill (Freqtrade plus a $4.54+/mo VPS[5][6]) prices your time instead of money - the model for readers with the skills.

The buyer's leverage improved across the board after the lifetime model died: every lane now has a no-upfront-payment entry (free tiers[7], OSS, trials), so any new lifetime-style offer competes against "start free, upgrade when a named feature earns it". That competition is structural, not promotional - it is why reintroducing lifetime pricing would be a step backward for buyers - and why this page would treat such a move as a signal worth investigating, pricing it against the mortality table above, rather than celebrating. The market already voted; this page just records the result. That is a buyer's market for automation - and the historical reason it exists is that enough buyers pre-paid enough dead licenses to fund the alternatives.

Warnings

• Any vendor reintroducing lifetime pricing is asking you to prepay their survival risk. Judge it with the break-even and mortality math above, and the FTC's marker for anything pitched with returns attached[7].
• Held licenses: verify changelog activity before trusting venue coverage. Valid does not mean maintained - an unpatched build is an orphaned bot with your keys.
• Small-vendor lifetime offers concentrate every risk on this page: unpublished maintenance history, thin teams, no secondary market. The discount is the compensation for all three.
• Trading fees are identical under every model - 0.1%-class per fill at major venues[4]. A "lifetime free trading" claim confuses software licensing with venue fees; the venues still charge.
• This hub is a market monitor, not a ranking. With zero bots matching the filter, the cards are empty by design - the math above is the content, and it updates as vendors do.
• Related pricing reads: the free lane covers the no-upfront models, the self-hosted lane prices the ops bill, and the open-source hub rates the maintenance health of the free route[6].