If you pay for trading tools, the first half of 2026 has been expensive. Three separate shocks hit the retail tool market in the span of weeks, and most traders are now paying more for the same stack — or scrambling to replace a piece that vanished.

Shock 1: TradingView's First Price Hike in a Decade

TradingView raised prices roughly 17–20% across every tier: Essential now runs $14.95/mo, Plus $34.95, Premium $69.95, and Ultimate $239.95. It is still the best charting platform on earth, and if charts are your livelihood, you will keep paying — that is precisely why they could raise prices.

But it is worth being honest about what most active traders actually use: charts, a watchlist, and a couple of alerts. If you are paying for Premium because you needed more alerts and indicators-per-chart, you are paying $840 a year — mostly for charting horsepower, with no scanner intelligence, no journal, no risk discipline, no daily market brief. The hike is a good prompt to ask what the rest of your workflow is worth.

Shock 2: Koyfin Discontinued Its Pro Tier

Koyfin — a genuinely excellent research terminal — discontinued its $39 Pro plan this spring. Monthly Pro subscribers are being migrated to Premium at $79/mo, roughly double. The entry tier is now Plus at $39. For fundamental research and macro dashboards, Koyfin remains strong. But if you were a Pro subscriber using it for market overview and watchlist monitoring, your bill just doubled for capabilities you may not need.

Shock 3: Fey Is Gone

Fey, the beautifully designed market-research app with a devoted following, was acquired by Wealthsimple and shut down for US users. Its features are being absorbed into Wealthsimple's Canadian platform. If you loved Fey for its calm, single-surface design — everything in one place, nothing screaming at you — you are now homeless. (We think about design the same way Fey did, for what it's worth.)

The Pattern Behind All Three

The market for trading tools is consolidating into two poles. At one pole: heavyweight platforms charging more every year for breadth most traders never touch. At the other: a wave of cheap AI-research apps that generate plausible-sounding analysis but no actual workflow. The middle — a focused set of tools an active trader actually uses every day, at a fair price — keeps getting squeezed.

Meanwhile the timing is brutal, because the PDT rule just died and a wave of new small-account day traders is arriving — exactly the people who cannot afford a $70–80/mo tool stack and exactly the people who most need structure.

How to Rebuild Your Stack (Without Overpaying)

Audit your stack against what you actually do in a trading day:

  • Market context. What regime are we in? What's breadth doing? Which sectors and themes are working today? This is 15 minutes every morning — it should be one screen, not four tabs.
  • Setup flow. A scanner that surfaces a handful of quality setups (ORB, breakouts, pullbacks) beats a screener with 400 columns you'll never configure.
  • Risk discipline. Position sizing tied to your stop, a daily max loss, and something that actually tracks it. This is the part almost no platform sells, because discipline doesn't demo well — and it's the part that decides whether you survive. (Risk management is the whole game.)
  • Review. A journal you'll actually use, with enough stats to show you your own patterns.
  • Charts. Be honest about your real needs. Multi-timeframe candles, volume, key levels, and position sizing on the chart covers the overwhelming majority of active-trader use.

If your current stack covers those five things for under $40/mo, you're in good shape — keep it. If it doesn't — or if the recent hikes pushed it past that — it's worth knowing the whole list above is what MAC Terminal does, in one flow, for $25/mo when our public beta ends. It is free during the beta, right now, no card required. We built it because we were tired of paying three subscriptions to do one job.

Tools don't make traders profitable. The right tools, used inside a plan, keep you alive long enough for your edge to show up. Pay for that — and not much else.