Introducing QuantConnect Organizations

Hi Lorenzo! We tried to make it closer to $48 for the old Prime->Researcher. We saw was most people were only running one backtest at a time anyway so this seems like a good fit for them to start. If people want they can also decrease the costs by removing some of the components. We're committed to getting this as low as possible for the community so we're also thinking of ways to offer live trading without the colocation (which is quite expensive). 

PS: At the most affordable individuals can still do live trading on institutional grade equipment for just $28 per month =). We'll also continue to give generous credits to academics. It's really important for us to continue to support the individuals who make the QuantConnect community great. 

Hi Jared 

What does Project IP Ownership mean in the pricing?

Hi Jared

Congrats on the update. Will the Research compute add on get around the 30 min limit on ML time when deployed live? As an existing user how do we add this on? 

Hi Jared!

With the free tier can you still compete in the tournaments that have prizes?

Like alpha the weekly alpha competition?

Thanks

Lorenzo Palmieri I really appreciate your support for QuantConnect despite having a student account =) I would love to make it work for your case; can you help us to get there? For us to offer clusters of 10+ nodes it needs to be self-sustaining so we're trying to make the true "costs of computing break-even" vs a "short term VC-funded loss". The true costs of pure computing for a high-CPU 4-core node are $70-120 per month. A GPU node is about $750 per month (1, 2, 3, 4); ignoring the data licensing fees, engineering salaries, 400TB hosting, and bandwidth costs.  

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Flame  I'll clear up the documentation today; professional trading firms typically sign IP assignment clauses with their employees to make any code they write property of the firm who employs them. This feature makes projects created in the organization mechanically the property of the company. 

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Ryan McMullan - Sorry those compute limits are per node in order to keep the price down for the community overall. Based on feedback like this we're thinking of making an unrestricted node, but it would be at the true cost would be something like 4x here :\. The live limits in live-trading are tricky because its a physical rack and we purchase real servers to host them.

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Emiliano Fraticelli - 100% the free tier can compete in Alpha Streams and competitions. We want to ensure the community opportunities are not restricted by finances, but by your ideas and efforts.  

We're building the credit system today; and it should be launched Monday-Tuesday so we can apply a credit to people's organizations. Would people be open to "give back" scenarios; like supporting others in the community for credit? (similar to the tip system which was mentioned in another thread)

Another idea we're bouncing around is having a non-colocated, cloud live environment for minute bars or higher only; where the strategies are not as latency-sensitive and it can be 50% cheaper to host them. This would also allow us to offer more powerful computing / GPUs for the live environment. What do you think?

Just a note there's no pressure to upgrade. All prime and professional subscription plans will be honored for at least 1 year 

I recently upgraded to QUANT RESEARCHER plan but still hitting the 10000 order limit error during backtest. I guess I need purchase further component/plan to get over this limit. Could you advice the minimum plan it needs? I think it could benefit other to make this information clear.

Jared,

Very interested in the cheaper cloud solution for those of us that don't need high latency or very short frequency data.  I'd prefer to give-up the more powerful computing/GPU to reduce costs even further.

If others are like me, this announcement triggered research into alternatives, such as hosting our own servers with an affordale provider like Linode ($ 5/m kubernet cluster - multiple algos in one cluster? - 1CPU, 1GB RAM).  That's a huge hassle however, and I'd much prefer to keep doing business with you and QC.  Really appreciate your openness to other ideas and honoring existing subscriptions.

Hi @Joe, sorry this is a bug which will be fixed Monday. Researcher should be same limits as Prime previously.

Edit: this was fixed.

@Tristan yes noted. We'll work on a cheaper live tier (not colo) in September. It will also come with all the instability of a cloud provider unfortunately. Cloud providers love to reboot your machines without warning.

Hi  @Jared, I am glade to hear Quant Researcher plan shouldn't have 10000 order limit (if I understand correct). However I just checked, where the 10000 order limit message is gone, the backtest still stopped at Total Trades = 10001. Any idea?

Hey Jared Broad,

Congratulations on the update. I really like the organization system along with the high customization. 

You mentioned that the prime and professional subscription plans will be honored for at least 1 year. Could you clarify what exactly that means in terms of the new system?

Also for some reason, my account has an error saying "Organization not found." I'm not exactly sure what that means.

Thanks,

Nibraas

Joe Yu Zhou - Sorry about that it was a mix up with the old free tier limits. It'll be restored tomorrow morning. 

Nibraas Khan - I've gathered the report-data and we'll fix it tomorrow morning. It looks like a handful of people's accounts didn't migrate perfectly.  

The old subscriptions roughly corresponded to a set of features and resources (e.g. Prime = 2 Servers with 4CPU ea). All subscribers with the old system were pinned in place to continue everything as before. To utilize features in the new system (dynamic scaling) they will need to swap to one of the new plans. 

"@Tristan yes noted. We'll work on a cheaper live tier (not colo) in September. It will also come with all the instability of a cloud provider unfortunately. Cloud providers love to reboot your machines without warning."

Thanks Jared!  This will be a great help.  And yeah, I guess you get what you pay for.  However, QC is good at notifying users when a live project has stopped running, so periodic reboots can be addressed fairly efficiently.

Hi Jared, 

congrats on the update! You and your team have done a really good job and invested a lot of effort, I can see that and I appreciate it. 

The organization layer gives us the ability to better adjust the resources to our needs and to scale up if necessary. But at least equally important is the fact that the new features makes it easier for institutional clients to operate on  the QC stack, which in turn increases the chances of attracting new clients and this in turn leads to higher chances of generating more income streams via the alpha streams market. 

Re: credit system

I like the idea even more than the tip system mentioned in another thread. This will create an incentive to provide  even more assistance to the community. Everybody benefits from this. 

Re: non-colocated servers as cheaper alternative

This would be an option for backtesting/research. But for Live Trading, I'd prefer a system that is as stable and fail-safe as possible. Not sure if the non-colocated servers can provide that. 

Re: prices

As already mentioned by Lorenzo, the corresponding package for the former Prime membership has now become somewhat more expensive ($78 instead of $20). I'm not sure if the old price was even cost-covering, so it might be an unsuitable reference point. But in the end, the community (or at least a substantial part of it) must of course be willing to pay the price. 

In my opinion, there should be a minimal setup for no more than $50/month which suits the needs of most quants here. I think the plan for $48 you've mentioned is a good starting point for this.  

What surprises me is the small price difference between the monthly and annual billing. If I see it right, there is only 10% discount for annual subscriptions + bronze support seat. But for someone who doesn't need the support seat it's equivalent to only 10% discount. Personally, I'd appreciate a higher discount for an annual billing (at least 20%). This would increase incentives to choose the annual version. 

A few more suggestions: 

- I'm pretty sure the Alpha Streams Market causes additional costs, too. (code review, technical ressources etc.) So it might be worth considering that only those members/organizations who have at least one seat (researcher or higher) are allowed to grant access to the alpha market. As a result, other add-ons could be offered at a lower price because the costs caused by the alpha market need less subsidy. I don't think that will scare anyonye since you get acces to the market for as little as $8/month and most serious quants would already have it included. 

- If I see it right, those are always our own nodes which we do not share with others and only uses by ourselves. Since such nodes are unsused most of the time, isn't there a way to offer "community-shared nodes" as a cheaper alternative in addition to the existing Add-Ons? The shared nodes would then have a higher average utilization and would also incur lower costs due to less dry runs. 

All in all, I think your offer is great! And I'm sure the community will not hesitate to scale up their packs once they generate a steady income via the alpha market. 

Thank you for the feedback Arthur,

 - Annual Billing/Shared Nodes - I appreciate that with a pure software product its possible to give heavier discounts for annual billing. QC's platform is more akin to an AWS/GCE platform which has to make (expensive) physical purchases of hardware to offer the compute. If you see on other cloud platforms the annual discount is more like 3-5% as the margins are already tight. I'll see what we can do though. Resource sharing & load balancing is baked into the price already. It is a pretty efficient system.

 - Alpha Streams - As much as possible I'd love to keep the equal opportunity by making it so the free tier can participate in Alpha Streams. Requiring a subscription might also classify it as a "pay-to-play" sweepstake with different legal requirements.

Thanks a lot for the update Jared. Any idea with second level data for options will be supported with this release? :) Seems to be the biggest hurdle for my most profitable strategy so far, especially when the market is volatile. 

Hi Jared,

Congrats on the upgrade/update to the platform. Can you please clarify Project IP Ownership for researcher or individual traders? 

Thanks