Frequently asked

A one-time license, no subscription — a founders price today that rises later, with no date set and no countdown on this page; buy now and the rise never reaches you. It includes 12 months of updates. The license itself never expires and nothing ever locks: when the year is up, every version you already have keeps working exactly as it did, and renewing is optional, never automatic, and only if you want what comes next. Current figures are in the pricing section. The license is verified on your machine with no phone-home, no server and no account, and can be moved between your computers. Checkout is handled by Stripe, which is the merchant of record; 30-day refunds per the terms.

Nothing changes in the app you're running. Every version released inside your 12 months is yours permanently — it keeps opening, importing, exporting and backing up, with no feature switched off and no nag. What lapses is only your claim on newer builds, and it is checked when you install one, never while you work. Renew when you want the next year of releases; the new year picks up where the old one ended, so renewing late costs you nothing and renewing early loses you nothing. If you never renew, you have a working copy of CrucibleTrade for as long as you own the machine.

It goes read-only — never locked. The 30-day clock starts on your first edit or import, not at install, so downloading the app and clicking through the sample costs you nothing. If it lapses before you buy, your whole journal stays readable: every trade, every report, the Playbook, the calendar. CSV export and backups keep working, so your history is always yours to take out. What pauses is the active workflow — importing, editing, matching, planning, saving reviews, and refreshing prices — until a license is activated. Nothing is deleted and nothing is held hostage.

Two families: Thinkorswim / Schwab account-statement CSVs and Fidelity history CSVs, plus Fidelity ATP order files for precise execution times. That is the whole list today — there is no broker API sync and no OAuth broker link, and we won't name brokers that aren't supported yet. Imports are account-scoped, so each file lands in the account it belongs to, re-imports don't double-count, and matching preserves the setup, notes, and stops you already entered. You can keep as many accounts as you trade.

Honestly: yes, if your day trading is equities and ETFs at Thinkorswim/Schwab or Fidelity and you journal at the end of the day. Quite a lot here is day-trading-native — a Day risk preset with a daily loss stop and new-risk cap, review charts down to 2-minute candles with session anchored VWAPs, a Timing report in 30-minute bins, the daily P/L calendar, the throttle, and the 30-second end-of-day card. The limits, stated plainly: no streaming quotes and no live tape — prices refresh when you ask; import is a CSV after the fact, not real-time; no options support, which rules out a good chunk of self-identified day traders; and intraday MAE/MFE depends on 2-minute bars that are only fetchable about 44 days back. If that trade works for you, it fits. If you need a live tape or options analytics, it doesn't, and we'd rather you knew now.

Your trading data, no — none of it, ever. Everything lives in a local SQLite database on your computer, and there is no account, no login, and no background sync. Rather than claim the app never opens a connection, here is the whole list of what it does open, which is two things.

1 · Market data you switch on. Chart candles, quotes and ticker metadata are fetched from Yahoo Finance, and they are off until you turn them on — a fresh install downloads nothing. Switched on, it fetches when you press Update Prices and when you open a trade whose chart isn't cached yet, and a request carries a ticker, an interval and a date range, never a position or a P/L. Leave them off and you type or paste your own marks: open P/L, open risk and the throttle all work with no feed at all.

2 · A once-a-day update check. Starting with 0.59.0 the app asks crucibletrade.com whether a newer version exists. The request is a version number, an operating system, and — once in an install's life — a flag that the install is new. No identifier of any kind, nothing kept on our side beyond a daily counter, and nothing about you or your trades. It exists because before it, someone on an old build had no way to hear that a new one shipped. Turn it off in Settings → Updates; Microsoft Store builds never send it. Full detail in the privacy policy.

Both have off switches, and the honest test beats any promise we could write here: firewall the app. Everything local keeps working. And you can back up, move, or delete your data at any time — it's a single file you control.

A desktop app. macOS (Apple silicon), Windows and Linux are all downloadable now — the macOS build is signed and notarized by Apple, so it opens with no Gatekeeper warning. The Windows installer carries no code-signing certificate, so Windows warns you once or twice before it runs; the download card spells out exactly what to click. A Microsoft Store build — which Microsoft signs, so it installs with no warning — is coming, and the release-notes list carries the word when the listing goes live. There is no Intel Mac build, and no mobile app. The app bundles its own engine and chart tooling, so there is nothing else to install and no separate server to run.

Yes, and this is the fastest way to judge it. One click — on the first-run screen or from Settings → Backup / Restore — loads a full sample journal: roughly 200 trades across two accounts, 20 symbols in nine sectors, a written playbook, cached intraday charts, and every report populated. Loading it does not start the trial clock. It isn't filler either: the sample is a trader with a character arc, so the Playbook's discipline-by-month strip actually reads up-and-to-the-right, and each closed trade's notes are written as model answers. A banner marks sample mode; one wipe starts your real journal.