If an EA Is Truly Profitable, Why Sell It? - page 5
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If the primary purpose were assistance, the software would be in the CodeBase or freely in a Blog or Article.
Web marketing is what it is, and the primary purpose it to turn a buck.
Your point is valid, but many of us sometimes want a maintained product rather than an abandoned piece of code, blog, or article. This is rare, but I found some really good free EAs here in the Market as well.
For strategies that are scalable (as mentioned in prior comments here), I wish we had more maintained EAs under Open Source licenses and welcoming contributions e.g. via git pull requests. I find it unfortunate that most of what we have are either closed source EAs in the Market here (and elsewhere) or abandoned EA source code written and released for illustration purposes only. For paid EAs, this is understandable, but free (as in free beer) EAs could maybe have their associated GitHub projects or such (and be free as in free speech) if we had that sort of culture here.
Besides lack of such culture, I suppose a concern (which I'd share) is that someone else would rip and further productize and market such Open Source free EAs as their own (although per license terms they'd have to give attribution somewhere). It's not too different from other Open Source projects vs. derived commercial products, yet a lot of us accept that and release our work as Open Source anyway, and the ecosystem actually works pretty well - just not in this community yet. The same applies to abandoned source code, but only partially - it doesn't remove the burden of further maintenance from whoever productizes it.
Oh, and thank you for ProfitByHourReportService.mq5.[M]any of us sometimes want a maintained product rather than an abandoned piece of code, blog, or article. This is rare, but I found some really good free EAs here in the Market as well
You are absolutely right. The best trading EA's that I've seen in the Market are 100% free. I don't use them simply because I can't inspect the source code, and I write my own.
Regarding the lack of maintenance, I've fixed/updated/converted many free source codes where that happened. For anyone who can't code too well, there's always the integrated MT5 AI Assistant─assuming that the user can frame the prompts appropriately.
So selling makes sense as a second income stream once that edge naturally starts shrinking anyway, and a lot of devs run it live while also selling access to fund further development.
That said, I'd still be cautious. . Backtest it yourself, run it on a demo first, and don't trust marketing claims blindly ,some EAs are legit, some are curve-fit garbage dressed up with a nice equity curve screenshot.
Speaking as an active MQL5 developer, raising initial trading equity is the primary catalyst for commercializing EAs.
The assumption that a developer with a profitable algorithm should automatically possess substantial trading capital overlooks a fundamental reality in software engineering and quantitative development:
Capital Asymmetry vs. Technical Expertise Developing an institutional-grade EA requires thousands of hours of R&D, quantitative backtesting, and architecture design. Technical proficiency in algorithmic trading does not inherently correlate with personal liquidity. A developer may possess a high-expectancy algorithm but lack the upfront capital required to extract absolute monetary value from it.
The Compounding Timeline & Opportunity Cost While compounding a small $500 account at 5–8% per month is mathematically sound, it generates negligible absolute income in the short term. Commercializing software converts intellectual property into immediate capital, bridging the gap between having a winning model and having the necessary equity to trade it meaningfully.
Funding Operational R&D and Infrastructure Developing specialized algorithms—such as XAU/Gold volatility systems—demands continuous infrastructure expenditure: high-performance backtesting servers, low-latency VPS nodes, and premium tick data feeds. Product sales directly fund these ongoing operational overheads without eroding trading equity.
Asking why people sell trading bots is like asking why restaurants sell food if they can eat it themselves. 😊
If EA can continue to make money, why would it need to be sold on the MT5 market?
Wouldn't creators make more money by quietly trading with their own funds instead of selling copies for a few hundred dollars?
As a potential buyer, this has always been my biggest concern. Is there a reasonable explanation, or should traders generally be skeptical of publicly selling EAs?
I would love to hear the real opinions of developers and traders.
A profitable EA can still make sense to sell. Trading profits depend heavily on available capital, while selling software gives the developer another source of income. For many developers, the EA itself is also the product of years of research and development.
The fact that an EA is sold doesn’t mean it doesn’t work — the real question is whether the developer is transparent about how it trades and the risks involved.
Asking why people sell trading bots is like asking why restaurants sell food if they can eat it themselves. 😊