The Next Big Steph: Follow the Freemium model and make core parts Open Sourced
Ninjatrader is a wonderful platform.
The Freemium model is great for increasing adoption.
With the Ninjatrader brokerage and the Kinetic data feed, Ninjatrader now has a regular subscription/transaction based revenue feed.
From a pure business point of view it does not make sense for NinjaTrader to invest a lot in new software development.
However, it is putting us subscribers at a disadvantage compared to other platforms.
Technology and trading ideas always move, and without continuous investment, the platform will start lagging.
There are so many enhancement requests which have been around for many years, which do not get prioritized.
Eventually they will start adding up to a point that people will quit using the platform.
I am personally paying $150pm to get the Bookmap data with Rithmic MBO even though I do not trade from it.
That is revenue that NT could have gotten a share of, if they were able to invest in software development to support it.
So how so we address this?
How about we make parts of Ninjatrader open source? This is the standard in the Freemium industry.
That will allow the community to enhance the core engine, with Ninjatrader keeping control of what goes into the official binary.
Of course anything which needs to be licensed should not be a part of the general open source.
Or there can be a special invite only community open only to those who have paid license to be able to get access to development of those features.
The current Ninjatader development is hit/trial since we do not have access to what is going on behind the scenes. Being able to understand things a layer or two deeper makes things much easier.
The Freemium model is great for increasing adoption.
With the Ninjatrader brokerage and the Kinetic data feed, Ninjatrader now has a regular subscription/transaction based revenue feed.
From a pure business point of view it does not make sense for NinjaTrader to invest a lot in new software development.
However, it is putting us subscribers at a disadvantage compared to other platforms.
Technology and trading ideas always move, and without continuous investment, the platform will start lagging.
There are so many enhancement requests which have been around for many years, which do not get prioritized.
Eventually they will start adding up to a point that people will quit using the platform.
I am personally paying $150pm to get the Bookmap data with Rithmic MBO even though I do not trade from it.
That is revenue that NT could have gotten a share of, if they were able to invest in software development to support it.
So how so we address this?
How about we make parts of Ninjatrader open source? This is the standard in the Freemium industry.
That will allow the community to enhance the core engine, with Ninjatrader keeping control of what goes into the official binary.
Of course anything which needs to be licensed should not be a part of the general open source.
Or there can be a special invite only community open only to those who have paid license to be able to get access to development of those features.
The current Ninjatader development is hit/trial since we do not have access to what is going on behind the scenes. Being able to understand things a layer or two deeper makes things much easier.
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