One-time licence
Options backtesting software you buy once
Volatlas is a $49 perpetual licence for macOS and Windows. Multi-leg backtests and 10,000-cell parameter sweeps run on your own machine, against market data you buy from your own vendor and cancel between research bursts.
What it buys
Where a perpetual licence changes the arithmetic
The price you paid is the price
One payment, lifetime updates, major versions included. A licence bought at $49 stays at $49 after the founder price rises to $99.
The data bill has a stop button
Market data comes from your own ThetaData or Databento account. Pull a research window, cache it, cancel. Nothing bills through the months you are trading rather than testing.
Sweeps cost nothing to repeat
A grid of up to 10,000 cells runs in parallel on your cores. There is no daily optimization cap and no per-run charge, so mapping a parameter space twice costs what mapping it once did.
Everything leaves as CSV
Trade log, equity curve, summary stats and the whole sweep grid, so a study can be checked in a spreadsheet or carried into your own notebook.
The field
How options backtesters charge
| Tool | What you pay | Options coverage |
|---|---|---|
| Volatlas | $49 once, lifetime updates | Multi-leg on 1-minute data, any root your data vendor sells, sweeps to 10,000 cells |
| Option Omega | $49.99 a month billed annually, $99.99 month to month | Multi-leg on a fixed ticker list, no XSP, 250 optimizations a day on the top tier |
| Option Alpha | $99 a month billed annually, or $0 against a qualifying broker account | Five tickers, 1-minute data over a three-year window, no parameter sweep |
| ORATS | $99 a month | 5,000+ symbols end of day back to 2007, about 140 intraday, 2,000 backtests a month |
| GreeksLab | €49 a month Premium, €99 a month Power | 0DTE SPX since 2012, positions and rules per strategy capped by tier |
| Whispertrades | $0.50 per position from a prepaid balance | History from 2016, 75 positions per backtest |
| MesoSim | $83 a month billed annually | Low-code, strategies defined as JSON jobs |
| eDeltaPro | $39 a month billed annually | End of day over 10+ years, no 0DTE |
| OptionNET Explorer | £500 plus VAT a year, about $660 | Windows desktop, stepping through history by hand, mid prices, no export |
Figures come from each vendor’s published pricing and documentation, shown as of August 2026.
Perpetual licences elsewhere
The one-time backtesters that skip the options chain
Retail backtesting has sold perpetual licences for decades, in charting and in strategy generation. AmiBroker is $299 Standard and $379 Professional with 24 months of updates, covering stocks, futures, forex and funds. StrategyQuant X starts at $1,290 for a lifetime licence and builds and stress-tests strategies for forex, futures and stocks. Forex Tester simulates one market by name.
None of the three carries an options chain, so a vertical, a condor or a calendar has nothing to be built from and no historical bid and ask to be priced against. Volatlas takes that pricing model into options, with 1-minute quotes, charged fills and Reg T margin.
Common questions
Buying it outright
- Which options backtesters can I buy outright?
- Volatlas at $49 is the one-time licence among the options backtesters compared here. AmiBroker and StrategyQuant X also sell perpetual licences but neither carries an options chain, and OptionNET Explorer is a desktop tool sold by the year rather than once. The rest of the table is a subscription or metered per position.
- What is the recurring cost after the licence?
- Market data, bought from your own vendor and billed to you. ThetaData starts at $40 a month for four years of history and is cancel-anytime. Databento is metered, where a year of 1-minute SPX weekly quotes runs about $265 plus about $8 of contract definitions. The data cost calculator prices your own window on both.
- Do I pay again for new versions?
- No. Updates are included for the life of the product, major versions included, and an update never removes a feature you paid for.
- What happens to my research when the data subscription lapses?
- Everything you pulled is cached as Parquet on your own disk and replays with no vendor involved. Cancelling costs you new history, not the studies you have already run.
- How many machines does one licence cover?
- Three machines you own or control, on macOS or Windows, and releasing a machine from Settings frees its slot for the next one.
- Why is one-time pricing possible here and not on the platforms?
- Backtests run on your computer and the market data is billed by your vendor to you, so there is no server to keep paying for and no data to license on your behalf. A hosted platform carries both costs every month whether you research or not, which is what the subscription funds.
One payment, then only data
$49 at the founder price, rising to $99, with lifetime updates, three machines and a thirty day refund. The recurring line on your card is a data vendor you picked and can cancel.