Keep the lights on.

What it costs to run

No exact figures here, because they move with how busy the market is. But it is a real monthly expense rather than a rounding error, and it is worth saying where it goes.

• The wire is the expensive part, on purpose. Every headline that reaches the site is read and judged before it is placed, all session long, on every story. That is most of the bill, and the next section explains why it is worth paying.
• The reads that run through the session. The risk-on / risk-off meter, the options levels, the distribution count, the per-asset notes — each one is work that happens on a schedule whether or not anyone is looking.
• A machine that never sleeps. The feeds have to stay connected around the clock, through the overnight session and the weekend, so that Monday's open is not starting cold.
• Bandwidth, which grows with every trader who starts using the site.

What you are paying for, plainly

Free dashboards are mostly plumbing: a feed arrives, it is stacked by time, and the reading is left to you. The expensive thing TradeMade does is the reading.

• Every headline is judged by Claude before it is placed. Roughly twelve hundred cross the wire on a session day, and each one is read for what it actually means — whether it moves anything, which instruments and which way, and whether it deserves to interrupt you. Matching alarming words instead would be free and would be wrong: it marks every “surge” and “crisis” as urgent, including the ones with nothing priced in, and a wire that cries wolf is one you stop reading. The judgement is the product; the feed is just the raw material.
• The right model for each job, chosen by measurement. Sorting twelve hundred headlines into a fixed set of answers and writing the morning read are not the same work, so they do not run on the same model — the sorting goes to a small fast one, the writing to the most capable one available. That was tested rather than assumed: on the same ninety headlines the cheaper model was vaguer, dropped figures and got a fact wrong, so the written work stays where it is.
• More models, at more steps. The work passes through several stages before it reaches the page — sorting, scoring, writing, the options read, the calendar — and each is a separate decision about which model does it best. We are adding models at more of those steps and pairing them where a second opinion earns its cost. Donations are what make that affordable to try.
• No model ever decides a number. Prices, the risk-on / risk-off read, the options levels and the distribution count are arithmetic on live data. The models read, sort and explain; they are never asked what something is worth, and if one cannot run, the last completed read stays up with a note saying why rather than a guess appearing in its place.

All of that runs on a schedule whether one person is watching or a thousand are, and the analysis is worked out once per cycle and served to everybody — so the bill does not climb with the number of readers. That is deliberate. It is also why the honest answer to “what does a donation do” is: it buys more careful reading for everyone, not faster service for you.

Why it would be appreciated

Everything on the dashboard is free to read, whether you give anything or not. Visitors and free accounts see one small card in the corner marked “Affiliate link”: a plain link to a product we would point you to anyway, which may earn us a commission if you sign up through it. Nothing on our side tracks you.

What a donation does is simple: it keeps the site running as it is, and it keeps the wire doing the careful version of its job instead of the cheap one. If TradeMade has been useful to you on a trading day, chipping in genuinely helps, and it is appreciated.