TrendSpider Review: The Automation Platform Priced by Capacity
TrendSpider is a cloud-based analysis, scanning, and automation platform for US equities, ETFs, futures, forex, and crypto, built around a pricing model most competitors avoid: every plan includes every feature, and the tiers sell capacity instead. What a subscriber pays for is how fast the scanner runs, how many alerts and bots stay live, and how deep backtests reach. The fit is a technically driven trader who wants scanning, backtesting, and automated execution in one system. The misfit is anyone screening international equities, which the platform does not cover, and anyone expecting a free tier or a free trial, because neither exists.
How the Plans Actually Work
The plan structure is the most important thing to understand before comparing this platform to anything else. All 4 tiers, Standard through Advanced, include the full feature set: the scanner, the backtester, the AI tooling, the bots, the charting. The tiers differ on documented usage limits, and for a screener buyer the limit that matters most is scanning timeframe. Standard scans on 2-hour candles and above. Premium scans down to 5-minute candles. Enhanced and Advanced scan on 1-minute data.
That single spec sorts the tiers by trading style better than the marketing labels do. A swing trader scanning daily setups loses nothing on Standard. An intraday trader needs Premium at minimum, and a scalper or systematic trader running 1-minute scans is shopping the top 2 tiers whether the budget likes it or not. Alerts follow the same ladder: 10 active alerts lasting 30 days on Standard, 50 for 90 days on Premium, 100 for 180 days on Enhanced, and 400 for a full year on Advanced, with live trading bots scaling from 5 to 100 across the same range.
Scanning and Idea Generation
The scanner supports multi-timeframe conditions, scheduled runs, and a real-time data flow view with filtering, alongside heat maps, bubble maps, seasonality profiles, and more than 700 prebuilt smart watchlists. Conditions can be built 3 ways: through visual point-and-click scripting, by describing the condition in natural language and letting the platform translate it, or in JavaScript for full control, with an AI coding assistant that writes or converts custom indicators from a prompt.
Idea generation reaches beyond price and volume. The feature list includes unusual options flow, government and congressional trading tracking, insider activity, media stock mentions, and outlier identification, which puts several data sets on this platform that normally require separate subscriptions. The options flow view is a headline inclusion given what dedicated flow tools cost, with the practical caveat covered under data fees below: the underlying real-time options feed is an add-on, and reading that flow well is its own skill, the one laid out in how to read options flow.
Automated technical analysis is the platform’s original signature. Pattern recognition, automated trendline and Fibonacci detection, anchored indicators, and multi-timeframe analysis run natively on charts that carry more than 300 indicators plus the platform’s own Raindrop chart type, with corporate fundamentals, analyst estimates, and Federal Reserve economic data available alongside the technicals.
Backtesting, AI Models, and Execution
The Strategy Tester backtests on up to 50 years of historical data with no coding required, and the surrounding tooling is what separates it from checkbox backtesting: variance testing across multiple timeframes and date ranges at once, forward testing, slippage and cost adjustments, and CSV export of results. Backtest depth is tiered, from 2,000 candles on Standard to 30,000 on Advanced, with a documented add-on raising Standard and Premium to 20,000 candles for $39 a month.
AI Strategy Lab trains machine learning models, KNN among the listed types, on user-defined data, goals, and timeframes, then deploys them into charts, scanners, alerts, and bots. Sidekick, the built-in AI assistant, reads charts, runs research, and builds scanners on request; every plan includes 25 Sidekick messages a month, with paid Sidekick tiers at $49, $129, and $349 a month for 100, 300, and 1,000 messages.
Execution closes the loop. Dynamic alerts attach to trendlines, indicators, and patterns rather than fixed prices, and no-code trading bots act on strategy signals. Order routing runs through SignalStack, included with every subscription for manual trading and 5 free automated orders a month, connecting to more than 30 brokerages and crypto exchanges. The alert-and-bot layer is what makes this a scanner in the working sense of screener vs scanner, monitoring and acting rather than just filtering.
Pricing
Four tiers, every feature on all of them, with capacity as the ladder. The pricing page currently displays reduced prices against struck-through list prices; both are shown below exactly as listed, with the current figures labeled “as low as” on the page, which reflects the cheapest billing configuration.
| Plan | Listed monthly price | Currently displayed | Key capacity limits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard | $82 | As low as $51.30 per month | 2-hour scanning and backtests (2,000-candle depth), 10 alerts (30 days), 5 bots, 5 workspaces |
| Premium | $137 | As low as $54.60 per month | 5-minute scanning and backtests (10,000 depth), 50 alerts (90 days), 10 bots, 10 workspaces |
| Enhanced | $183 | As low as $70.76 per month | 1-minute scanning and backtests (20,000 depth), 100 alerts (180 days), 50 bots, priority support |
| Advanced | $321 | As low as $124.12 per month | 1-minute scanning, 30,000-candle backtests, 400 alerts (365 days), 100 bots, up to 52 training sessions a year |
There is no free tier and no free trial. The platform offers a 14-day paid trial, with the fee depending on the plan, and states plainly that trial fees are non-refundable. The refund policy on full plans is a 72-hour window from the initial charge, minus the trial fee, and subscriptions auto-renew by default with cancellation available anytime for future cycles. Annual billing carries a discount over monthly per the official FAQ. Payment methods include major cards, PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay.
The judgment on this structure cuts both ways. All-features-on-every-tier is genuinely buyer-friendly, since a Standard subscriber gets the same AI Strategy Lab and backtester as an Advanced one, just smaller. The paid trial and the 72-hour refund window are the opposite: this is one of the least generous evaluation setups in the category, and a buyer needs to arrive already fairly sure, because trying it costs money and changing course after 3 days costs the rest of the term.
Data, Coverage, and the Fees Around Them
Coverage per the official FAQ: real-time data for US equities, ETFs, futures, forex, and crypto. International equities are not covered, which places every non-US stock market outside the platform, and OTC plus some index data runs delayed by up to 15 minutes, with CBOE indexes documented at a 10-to-15-minute delay.
The data fee schedule is published and worth reading closely, because the headline subscription is not always the whole bill. Real-time US equity and ETF data is free for non-professional users, which is better than most rivals manage. Real-time futures data costs $7.50 a month (or $90 a year) for non-professionals. Real-time OPRA options data costs $9.50 a month (or $114 a year) for non-professionals, which means the unusual options flow feature only runs on live data after that add-on is paid. Professional users, as the exchanges define them, pay $29 a month for US equity data and $79 a month for options data. The pattern is the same plan-plus-data math covered in real-time vs delayed data, softened here by the free equities feed and sharpened by the options and futures add-ons.
Bottom Line
TrendSpider is the deepest scan-to-automation pipeline available at retail prices that still includes fundamentals, alternative data, and machine learning tooling in the same subscription, and its all-features pricing model means even the cheapest tier is the real product rather than a teaser. It earns its automation-focused position in the best stock screeners roundup. The honest counterweights: the Standard tier’s 2-hour scanning makes the entry price misleading for intraday traders, whose real cost starts at Premium, the evaluation terms (paid trial, 72-hour refund) put the risk of a wrong purchase on the buyer, and a US-centric coverage map plus per-feed data fees mean the sticker price understates the cost for options and futures traders.
Pros
- Every plan includes the full feature set, including the backtester, AI Strategy Lab, pattern recognition, bots, and scanner, with tiers differing only on capacity
- Strategy Tester runs on up to 50 years of data with variance testing, forward testing, slippage adjustments, and CSV export
- Real-time US equity and ETF data is free for non-professional users, with forex and crypto data included
- Scan conditions can be built visually, in natural language, or in JavaScript, with an AI assistant that writes custom indicators from a prompt
- Execution is built in: dynamic alerts on trendlines and patterns, no-code bots, and SignalStack routing to 30+ brokers with 5 free automated orders a month
Cons
- No free tier and no free trial; the 14-day trial is paid, its fee is non-refundable, and full-plan refunds are limited to 72 hours from the charge
- Standard’s 2-hour minimum scanning timeframe rules the entry tier out for intraday trading, pushing active traders to Premium or above
- US equities, ETFs, futures, forex, and crypto only, with no international stock exchange coverage
- Real-time options data costs an extra $9.50 a month for non-professionals, so the unusual options flow feature is not live out of the box
- Sidekick AI is capped at 25 messages a month on every plan, with meaningful usage priced at $49 to $349 a month on top of the subscription