Why We’ll Soon Be Changing Our Pricing Plans and Reducing our Free S&P 500 Dataset to The Magnificent Seven
Important pricing and subscription changes are coming to The Wheel Screener this summer.
The Wheel Screener is a beginner-to-expert friendly option screener that analyzes, classifies, and categorizes all options available at the close of the market on a given day. The team is always more than happy to share their technical insights, market opinions, and methodologies here on Medium. This article focuses on behind-the-scenes financial decisions we are making in order to keep The Wheel Screener a useful, competitive, and powerful tool for traders from beginner to advanced.
Summary: our currently free S&P 500 dataset will be bumped to a new $7 / month Starter Plan, while our Premium Plan will increase from $10 to $39 a month. We will also start offering one-time lifetime payments for the Starter Plan at $149 and $749 for Premium. Finally, our free trial will be removed. Don’t worry if you’re already subscribed to Premium or have a Lifetime subscription! These changes won’t affect you!
Pricing Changes Coming Soon
Starting this summer, we’re about to do something you’re “never supposed to do” in the SaaS product world — and that’s reduce the functionality of our free plan, and increase the price of our premium plan. I’m sure I’ll lose the interest of some potential customers — but only the free ones.
When I started The Wheel Screener in 2021, I had no idea the success it would grow to today, reaching the front page of Google for a variety of options-related queries, over 1,500 unique customer accounts, and achieving over $300 MRR, or $3600 ARR with only organic growth tactics (articles and blog posts like this one).
Yeah, I know, in the FinTech space, $300 / $3600 AAR is absolute peanuts — it’s what a decent trader could make in a single good day of trading. This is partially the reasoning behind why I’m reducing the free tier to just the stocks in the Magnificent Seven. I want everyone to see the key problem that The Wheel Screener solves: focusing on risk vs. reward trades within a fully customizable options screener to find all kinds of options across the entire market. I hope then that customers will actively choose to upgrade and support further developments of the product. The ultimate goal here is that I am able to continue building useful fintech products as a soloprenuer full-time. Unfortunately, with $300 MRR, I’m nowhere near this goal!
New Pricing Tiers: Free, Starter, and Premium — Monthly and Lifetime
With this “bad” news, there is “good” news: we’ll be offering our full S&P 500 dataset as a new Starter Plan for just $7 / month. In our opinion, this is still a generous offer since our S&P dataset has typically anywhere from 4,000 to 7,000 contracts per day.
We’ll also be increasing the monthly cost of our Premium Plan from $10 to $39. This is indeed a large increase, but after reviewing some of the plays found by our screener, we’ve realized a well run wheel strategy can potentially generate hundreds of dollars a month, if not more. You could also compare this tier to similar much more expensive competitors who are offering similar “end of day” datasets for $99 per month or more! Also, as a thanks for the support for current subscribers, the subscription will remain at $10 per month for life.
We also realize that subscriptions are a pain to manage — we don’t like them either. Therefore, at a discounted price, we’ll be offering one-time lifetime payments, with at least two years of support guaranteed. The price points for these plans will be $149 for the Starter Plan and $749 for the Premium Plan. We hope you’ll consider a lifetime plan as these are easily the best way to support The Wheel Screener.
Removing Free Trials
We’ll also be removing our free trials. We believe that $7 a month to see all contracts found by our screener in the S&P 500 is more than a fair price for those interested in getting a taste of all the premium features. For the price of a fancy coffee, you can unlock the daily S&P 500 dataset and features, try The Wheel Screener for a month, and if you don’t like it, you can cancel at any time.
Many More Features In The Pipeline
As always, we’re never done building new features and improving the product. Here are some of the features we’re still working on:
- Increase stability of our popular Vanna, Gamma, and Charm dashboards (which have been deactivated on and off repeatedly because of the throughput of the services we use).
- Screener formula builder — build your own formula to select options with
- Real-time data from the broker of your choice — including trading!
- Live option purchases and sales — also from the broker of your choice- to see what market makers and large players are speculating on in major names in real time
- A LEAP screener, focusing on those 1 to 3 year longer-term options for traders with a much longer time horizon
To build to these features, we simply must start building more revenue to be able to tackle these larger tasks.
Thank You and Let’s Continue!
Thank you for your understanding and participation in this journey so far. We’re looking forward to building powerful features over the coming years and the ever-changing development of options markets.
-Chris
We’re on a mission to make options data easily understandable with a 100% customizable dashboard for any trader, from beginner to advanced.
Interested in learning more? Check us out at The Wheel Screener.
Until next time,
-The Wheel Screener Team
