Should you build your own TradingView?
Browser based charting, screening and alerting across stocks, futures, forex and crypto, with a scripting language and a large community of published indicators.
The chart widget itself is not the product, and TradingView proved that by open sourcing a perfectly good one: lightweight-charts is MIT licensed and you can have candles on screen in an afternoon. What you cannot build is the data pipe behind it. Real-time consolidated equity, futures and options feeds are licensed per exchange, per user, with entitlement checks and redistribution rules, and the free endpoints you will end up scraping are delayed, rate limited and quietly break. On top of that sits Pine Script and roughly a decade of community published indicators and strategies, plus screeners over every listed symbol, alerts that fire while your laptop is shut, and broker order routing. A local build gives you crypto in real time and equities on a delay, which is either fine or completely useless depending on your time horizon.
ENOriginal research content in English. Original prompt preserved in English.
Build a local-first market charting app called "deskchart". Single user, runs on my machine, no accounts, no telemetry, no cloud.
Stack, not negotiable:
- Vite + React + TypeScript for the UI
- lightweight-charts (MIT, from TradingView) for rendering candles and overlays
- A small Express + TypeScript server in the same repo as a data proxy and cache
- SQLite via better-sqlite3 for candle cache, watchlists and alerts
- pnpm workspaces, one command to run both: pnpm dev
Data:
- Crypto: Binance public REST klines endpoint, no key needed, treat this as the real-time path
- Equities and ETFs: Stooq daily CSV as the default source, with an optional adapter interface so another provider can be dropped in via .env
- Cache every fetched candle range in SQLite and only request the missing tail on reload
- Put any API keys in .env, read via a single config module, ship .env.example. Never hardcode secrets
- Print a visible "DELAYED" badge on any symbol whose source is not real time. Do not pretend otherwise
Features in scope:
- Symbol search over a locally seeded symbol list, watchlists stored in SQLite
- Candlestick chart with timeframe switcher: 1m, 5m, 1h, 1d, 1w
- Indicator overlays computed client side: SMA, EMA, VWAP, RSI and MACD in a lower pane
- Persisted horizontal price lines and trendlines per symbol, saved to SQLite
- Simple alerts: price crosses above or below a level. Server polls every 60s and fires a desktop notification via node-notifier plus a row in an alerts log
- Dark theme, keyboard shortcuts for timeframe and symbol switching
Explicitly out of scope, do not attempt:
- Any scripting language or Pine Script compatibility
- Broker connections or order entry
- Social feed, published ideas, comments
- Multi-user auth, hosted deployment, mobile apps
- Scraping any paid or authenticated data feed
Deliverables: working repo, README with setup and a blunt "data limitations" section, seed script for symbols, and vitest coverage on the indicator math and the cache-gap logic.The prompt opens pre-filled in your agent. Review it before running. · this prompt is generated from the build plan · improve it via PR
What would building your own look like?
A local charting app that pulls daily and intraday candles from free public endpoints, caches them in SQLite, renders them with lightweight-charts, and polls a handful of price alerts you define yourself.
What you will need
- Node 20 plus
- A machine left running if you want alerts to fire
- Tolerance for delayed or rate limited free equity data
- Binance or similar public API for anything that needs to be genuinely real time
Because the subscription is mostly a data and uptime bill wearing a charting UI. Traders pay so that real-time quotes are entitled and correct, so alerts fire at 2am without a laptop being awake, so the same watchlist and drawings appear on phone and desktop, and so the indicator they read about on a forum is one click away instead of a weekend of reimplementation. For anyone whose decisions happen on a daily or weekly candle, though, the paid tiers are largely convenience, and a local build genuinely covers it.
xLicensed real-time exchange data for equities, futures and options; free sources are delayed and fragile
xPine Script and the enormous library of published indicators and strategies other people already wrote
xServer side alerts that fire when your device is off, plus push and email delivery
xScreeners and scanners over every listed symbol, and multi-market symbol coverage in general
xPolished mobile and desktop apps with drawings and watchlists synced across all of them
xBroker connections and one click order entry from the chart
Nothing worth pointing at. That’s why the prompt exists.
How much does TradingView cost?
- Monthly billing
- $14.95/mo$14.95/mo
- Per year
- $179/yr$179/yr
- Annual billing
- $155/yr13% cheaper than paying monthly
- On a Brazilian card, with 3.5% IOF
- R$78.12/moR$812/yr
Saved to My list. You will see a notice on this site when the price changes.
You complete the purchase on TradingView’s site. Vibe Radar does not handle payments.
Is it cheaper to build or buy TradingView?
Adjust the numbers: hours to build, your hourly rate, running costs and the subscription price.
Over 24 months, subscribing is cheaper.
Starting hours estimated from the analysis (a weekend). Does not price what you give up (support, integrations, security).
Can I rebuild TradingView?
Not really. TradingView’s value is not the code: The moat is licensed exchange data plus a decade of community written Pine Script that only runs on their servers. See the honest breakdown above.
How much does TradingView cost?
TradingView costs about $14.95/mo (Essential, checked 10/20/2026), which is $155 per year.
What do I lose by replacing TradingView?
Honestly: Licensed real-time exchange data for equities, futures and options; free sources are delayed and fragile; Pine Script and the enormous library of published indicators and strategies other people already wrote; Server side alerts that fire when your device is off, plus push and email delivery; Screeners and scanners over every listed symbol, and multi-market symbol coverage in general; Polished mobile and desktop apps with drawings and watchlists synced across all of them; Broker connections and one click order entry from the chart. If any of those are load-bearing for you, keep paying.
Is there an open-source alternative to TradingView?
No mature open-source alternative worth pointing at, which is exactly why the one-shot prompt on this page exists.