Options backtesting you buy once
Build multi-leg strategies, sweep every parameter, and run them over years of 1-minute options data on your own Mac. One licence, and the only recurring cost is the data you already control.
Cost over three years
Research happens in bursts. Subscriptions do not.
Traders research in phases, then go and trade. A platform subscription bills through the quiet months anyway. A licence does not, and wholesale data is cancel-anytime.
| What you pay | Year one | Three years |
|---|---|---|
| VolatlasLicence once, plus a year of 1-minute SPX each year | $113 | $241 |
| Option OmegaBacktesting tier, billed annually | $600 | $1,800 |
| WhispertradesOne 500-run sweep over full history, at $0.50 a position | $250 | per sweep |
Volatlas row is the licence plus a year of 1-minute SPX on Databento at about $64, metered, so it moves with what you pull. On ThetaData’s $40 cancel-anytime tier four research months a year comes to $209 and $529. Whispertrades charges $0.50 per position for its full 2016-to-present history and prorates shorter windows. Competitor rates are their cheapest published billing option, shown as of August 2026.
The app
A backtester that charges what a broker would
Multi-leg strategies
Legs, entry rules, exit rules and sizing are all editable. Pick strikes by delta or by offset, enter on a schedule, exit on a profit target, a stop, or a DTE.
Sweeps at zero marginal cost
Put an axis on any rule and run the whole grid in parallel. A 500-cell sweep over a cached chain finishes in seconds and costs nothing to run again.
Margin the way a broker charges it
Every position is charged what would be held against it, Reg T uncovered rules included, so CAGR and drawdown are returns on an account rather than on a number nobody checked.
Greeks computed in the app
Black-Scholes greeks and an IV solver run off each quote's own mid, so delta-based strike selection works on any chain you load.
History cached on your disk
Everything you download is kept as Parquet on your own machine. A year of 1-minute SPX is about 184MB and replays at roughly 110M quotes per second.
Everything exports
Trade log, equity curve, summary stats and the sweep grid all come out as CSV, with each leg in its own columns.
Your data
Wholesale data, billed to you, cached on your disk
Databento
SimplestPaste a key once and pull metered history billed to your own account. Nothing to run and nothing to keep running. A year of 1-minute SPX prices at roughly $64.
ThetaData
Widest historyFor the broad multi-underlying pulls, from $40 a month, cancel-anytime. You run the vendor's own Terminal, a Java process on your machine, and Volatlas reads it over localhost, so your login never reaches us.
Both paths fill the same local cache. Load a window twice and the second load downloads nothing, extend it forward and only the new days are fetched.
Founder edition
$49
$99
once, for the app. It goes to $99, and your licence stays yours.
- Perpetual licence, no monthly platform fee
- One year of updates included
- Unlimited backtests and parameter sweeps
- Move your seat between Macs from inside the app
- Your data subscription stays yours to start and stop
- CSV export of everything the engine produces
Common questions
Before you buy
- What data do I need?
- A Databento key or a ThetaData subscription. The quickest start is a Databento key, which you paste once and nothing else runs. ThetaData covers the wider history and works the other way round, you run the vendor's own Terminal and Volatlas reads it over localhost. Either way your credentials stay on your machine and the market data never passes through us.
- What does the data cost?
- On Databento a year of 1-minute SPX prices at roughly $64, metered and billed to your own account, so you pay for the pulls you make. ThetaData is cancel-anytime and starts at $40 a month for four years of history, so you stop paying when you stop researching.
- Does it keep working when my data subscription lapses?
- Yes. History you have already downloaded is cached on your disk and replays with no vendor involved. Cancelling your data subscription costs you new history, not the research you have already done.
- What do I get for the price?
- A perpetual licence at the founder price of $49, one year of updates included, and a seat you can release and move to another Mac from inside the app. The licence stays yours at that price when it goes to $99.
- What does it run on?
- macOS, as a signed and notarized universal build for both Apple Silicon and Intel.