Buy once

A trading journal without a subscription

The journal category settled on renting: an account, a monthly bill, and your trading history on the vendor's servers. CrucibleTrade is the other shape — a desktop app you buy once, keeping your journal in a file you own. Here is exactly what that changes, including what it costs you.

The short version: you pay one time. Twelve months of new versions are included, and the license itself never expires — every version you already have keeps working forever, whether or not you ever pay again. Your journal is a SQLite file in a folder you chose. There is no account, no cloud, and no server that could switch your copy off. See pricing for the current terms.

What you're really objecting to

"I don't want another subscription" usually isn't about the monthly number. Traders who say it are pointing at three specific things, and they're right about all three.

The bill outlives the use

Journaling is seasonal. You review hard for a month, you get busy, you come back in the spring — and you paid through the quiet stretch for a record you weren't reading.

Stopping costs you the history

Cancel a hosted journal and the years of trades you fed it go behind the paywall. The thing you were building is the thing you lose.

It's a fixed drag on the account

A monthly software bill is a guaranteed loss against a P/L that isn't guaranteed anything. Small, but it never has a losing month of its own.

The record isn't yours

Your complete trading history — every position, size and mistake — sits on a company's servers under their retention policy, not yours.

What "buy once" means here, precisely

Vague ownership claims are easy to make, so here is the mechanism.

One payment, not a term. There is no recurring charge and no card on file that renews.
Twelve months of updates are included. Every version released inside that window is permanently yours.
The license never expires. What lapses after twelve months is only your claim on newer builds — never anything you already installed. Renewing is optional, never automatic, and a lapse takes nothing away.
Verification is offline. Your key is an Ed25519 signature checked on your own machine. No server is contacted to activate, and there is nothing anyone could switch off remotely.
It moves with you. Remove the license from one computer, activate it on the next.

And the trial is shaped the same way. Thirty days, every feature, no card and no account — with the clock starting on your first edit or import rather than at install, so installing it and looking around costs you nothing. When the trial lapses the app goes read-only, never locked: the whole journal, every report, CSV export, and backups keep working. We would rather you decide with your data in front of you than be squeezed into deciding.

Your journal is a file

Everything you put in — imported fills, reconstructed trades, setups, notes, mistake tags, playbook rules, risk settings — lives in one SQLite database on your computer. You can back it up, move it to another machine, put it on an external drive, or open it with any SQLite tool on earth. Backups can be pointed at a folder outside the app's own data directory, which matters more than it sounds: it means an uninstall can't take your history with it.

There is no account to make and nothing to log into. There is also no CrucibleTrade server holding a copy, which is the part that makes the ownership claim real rather than rhetorical.

What leaves your machine

Nothing about you or your trading, ever. No account, no cloud, no sync, no usage analytics. Rather than promise zero network activity — which would be false — here are the only two outbound requests the app makes:

Optional price and chart lookups, which ship turned off. A fresh install fetches nothing until you switch them on, and you can type or paste prices by hand instead — open P/L, open risk, and the risk throttle all work from what you enter.
A once-a-day update check carrying the app's version, the operating system, and — once in an install's life — a flag that the install is new. No identifier, nothing about your trades or your license. It has an off switch, and Microsoft Store builds don't make it at all.

Block the app in your firewall and everything local keeps working. The privacy policy spells out both requests field by field.

The trade you're making

A one-time desktop app can't do some of what a hosted subscription does, and you should know which things before you buy rather than after.

	CrucibleTrade	Typical hosted journal
Payment	Once	Monthly or annual, ongoing
If you stop paying	You keep the app and the file	Access ends
Where the record lives	A file on your disk	The vendor's servers
Account required	No	Yes
Getting your fills in	✗ CSV import, Thinkorswim/Schwab and Fidelity only	✓ Automatic sync, often 100+ brokers
Journaling from a phone or browser	✗ Desktop only	✓ Common
Options & futures analytics	✗ Equities and ETFs	✓ Common
Community, sharing, leaderboards	✗ None	✓ Common
Who maintains your backups	You do	They do

Compared against the common shape of hosted subscription journals as a category, not against any one product's current feature list — those change without telling us. Verify specifics with each vendor before you buy either.

What you get for the one payment

Paying once is the pricing model, not the pitch. The reason to use it is that it covers the whole trading day rather than only the part after the close:

Before the open — entry + stop + a risk mode become a share count instantly, sized against that account's risk budget, with the setup's own written rules beside the plan and your track record on that setup showing its sample size.
During the day — an open-position book with a scale-in/scale-out ledger, split stops across up to three lots, a per-account "risk left" gauge, and an "if stopped" figure showing where the book lands if every working stop fills. R stays anchored to your initial stop, so trailing never quietly rewrites the denominator.
After the close — a filterable review queue, each trade replayed on real 2-minute-to-daily candles with entry, exit and both stop lines, graded rule by rule against your playbook; eleven report lenses; mistake costs in dollars that reconcile to your net P/L; and a month-over-month read on whether your discipline is actually improving.
Every day — a 30-second report card that grades the day on process rather than P/L. A red day where you followed every rule is an A.

Questions

Is there a free version?

There's a 30-day trial with every feature, no card and no account, and it lapses to read-only rather than locking. There is no permanently free tier.

What am I paying for if updates stop after a year?

The app you have. It doesn't degrade, phone home, or check a subscription — the update window only governs which newer versions you're entitled to install. Renewal is optional and never automatic.

Can I see it before paying anything?

One click at first run loads a complete sample year — about 200 trades across two accounts, a written playbook, graded reviews, closed day cards, filled charts — so every screen has real-looking data in it immediately. Loading the sample doesn't start your trial clock.

What if the company goes away?

The app keeps running, the license keeps verifying offline, and your journal is a SQLite file on your own disk.

Try it on a full year of trades

Download it, load the sample, and click through the whole workflow before you decide.

Download free See pricing

No account, no card, none of your data. The trial clock starts on your first edit, not at install.

Other products are described here as a category — hosted, account-based, subscription-priced journals — rather than by name, because their features and pricing change independently of this page. CrucibleTrade is journaling and planning software: it does not place orders, provide trading advice, or make recommendations.