kappi vs StonkJournal: What Are You Paying the Extra $5 For?

	kappi	StonkJournal
Price	$15/month ($12.75 via a referral link)	$10/mo
How trades get in	You type them, before the fact	You type them
Free tier	None	Free, no trade limit, no card
Fixed once committed	Yes — sealed at commit	No — revisable
Can a stranger check it	Yes — public Merkle anchor	No
Annual cost	$180 ($153 via referral)	$120, or $0

Why is this the cleanest comparison on the site?

Because StonkJournal and kappi capture trades the same way. There is no import step on either side — you type the trade in. Every other comparison here is muddied by a broker connection that changes what the record even contains. This one is not, so the difference between $10 and $15 is unusually easy to name.

free tier with no trade limit and no card required. That is a real offer, and $120 a year for the paid tier is the floor price in this market. kappi is $180 a year, $153 through a referral link — a $60 difference at list, or $5 a month.

What does the extra $5 a month buy?

One thing, and it is worth stating without decoration: you lose the ability to change the entry.

A commit is sealed before the fact and released on a time-capsuled delay.

Every sealed commit is hashed into a Merkle tree and anchored to Hedera, so the log is append-only and independently checkable.

Everything else follows from that. A stranger can check the record because it was sealed before the outcome and anchored where neither you nor kappi can rewrite it. And you can check it too — against the version of yourself that wrote it, rather than the version that remembers writing it.

Why does that matter if you are only journalling for yourself?

Because the person a journal most often misleads is its author. The entry you write after a loss is not the plan you had before it; it is the plan you wish you had had, and it goes into the same editable field. Over a few months the file quietly converges on a trader who is more disciplined than the one who placed the trades, and the discipline gap is invisible precisely where it matters.

A seal removes the option. Not by willpower — by construction.

When should you pick StonkJournal?

When you want a fast, cheap, no-friction place to write trades down and nobody is going to audit it. The free tier has no trade limit and no card requirement, which makes it hard to beat for a trader who just needs somewhere to keep notes. Starting there and moving later costs nothing.^[1]

When should you pick kappi?

When you want the record to survive contact with a sceptic, or with your own hindsight. $15 a month, $12.75 through a referral link, and no free tier. kappi is broker-agnostic. Commits are made from the Chrome extension, so any brokerage works — or your own journal, kept wherever you already keep it. No import, no account linking, no requirement to trade inside someone else's platform.