Credit card nag screen removal

Based on the information provided in the extracts, it seems that QuantConnect requires a credit card for ID verification, even for accessing free data or services. This is likely a measure to prevent misuse of their resources.

If you're on the free tier and you're seeing a prompt to enter your credit card information, it doesn't necessarily mean you'll be billed. However, if you're uncomfortable with this requirement, you have the option to reach out to QuantConnect's support team for further clarification or to express your concerns.

To remove your credit card information, you can follow these steps:

1. Open the Billing page.
2. Click Remove.
3. Click OK.

After these steps, the Credit Card section should display "No entries found".

Please note that your organization's billing information is never saved by QuantConnect. It’s passed to the Stripe billing system. If you cancel your subscription, your live trading nodes stop running. So, for user safety, your subscriptions automatically renew each month.

If you wish to change your subscription back to the free plan, there is a “Downgrade to free” button on the billing page. If you encounter any issues, you can email support for assistance.

Sources:

• QuantConnect Documentation
• QuantConnect Forum Discussion
• QuantConnect Forum Discussion

Sorry, but this is disappointing.

And the billing is advertised as "from $8" and it ends with a bill of $600/year at entry level.

Another aggressive point.

So far I don't know if the tool can meet my needs (as I need to make it run to understand its philosophy) and I'm already forced to pull out my CC.

This is not user friendly.

So I will stop evaluating your tool and look for another backtesting solution.

Hi Jonathan, Ashlon

If you've ever used AWS or Google Cloud, a card is required to open a free account. This is a standard in cloud computing platforms. We have many free clients who abuse the free tier with multiple accounts, and forcing a card on file is a simple way to ensure one free account per user. 

Best

Jared

I don't have a card to use.

The cloud services you specified are extensively documented (with correct, up-to-date documentation and videos addressing how the functionality translates to customer experience) They also provide a transparent service to customers, largely aiming to emulate execution behavior they can test elsewhere (i.e. by running their container images locally). There is essentially nothing customers need to investigate to understand the basic experience of using them. 

On the other hand, cloud providers with non-transparent execution models, such as Google Colab or repl.it (or QuantConnect!), conventionally allow usage without providing billing information.

QuantConnect does not even have up-to-date freely-available depictions of actual usage (from a run-through of your 101 course, even your tutorial videos are both outdated for the current API and (aside from your A-Z course) specific to the learning setup rather than the actual trading platform). It is also very opinionated as a trading and backtesting platform, using its own libraries and data providers, bringing it even further from an ordinary cloud provider than my above examples.

The combination of your opinionated nature and the partial vendor lock-in you impose makes your Docs pages insufficient to evaluate QuantConnect's usefulness as a product. To know whether it fits our use-case, we need to be able to run tests and investigate their behavior, see what information you provide and how it maps onto the actual market, map (degenerate variants of) our own strategies onto your framework to see how difficult they are to implement, et cetera.

Requesting our individual billing information, before we know if you're useful enough to even investigate whether you can be trusted to handle it safely, is a fairly good way to incentivise using competing services instead. Currently I have to check if any of my teammates are willing to take this risk on behalf of the team and execute the above tests, otherwise QuantConnect will be disqualified as a provider service for us in particular.

I understand the need to protect your margins from false sign-ups, but you have already implemented mechanisms to shift the burden of proof to other organizations, such as Google/Facebook based sign-in.

Using those as alternate unique identifiers, or combining them with other conventional identifiers (e.g. secondary verification passwords or phone numbers), should be sufficient to mitigate or eliminate unjustified usage, while not asking new users to trust your organization before they know if you offer a product worth the risk.