Why Is kappi $15 a Month?

What does $15 a month cost you in return terms?

A subscription is a fixed cost against a percentage return, so the only honest way to read the price is as a hurdle: the return you have to make before you are level. $15 a month is $180 a year, and $12.75 through a referral link is $153.

Account	$180/yr as a hurdle	$153/yr with a referral
$5,000	3.60%	3.06%
$10,000	1.80%	1.53%
$25,000	0.72%	0.61%
$50,000	0.36%	0.31%

On a $25,000 account the recorder costs 0.72% a year. For comparison, a single trade sized at a normal 2% risk puts 2.78 times the entire annual subscription on the table in one position. If the price is the binding constraint on the decision, the account is small enough that the sizing question matters far more than this one.

How does that compare with a trading journal?

Journals are the adjacent category and most of them cost more: $35/mo for TradeZella,^[1] $29.95/mo for TraderSync and $29.95/mo for Tradervue,^[2] each billed monthly. Edgewonk is the exception at $197/16mo — a licence rather than a subscription, which over that term is $12.31 a month, less than kappi.^[3]

But price is the hook rather than the argument, because these answer different questions. A journal is for understanding your own trading and the mature ones are very good at it. A recorder is for the case where somebody else has to believe you, and no amount of analytics produces that at any price. Traders who need both routinely run both; $180 a year is not the reason to choose.

Why is there no free tier?

Because the product is a record whose worth comes from what it costs to produce. A record that anybody can mint by the thousand at zero marginal cost is a record nobody has any reason to check — the scarce thing is not the storage, it is the commitment, and a price is what makes a commitment mean something. Every account on kappi has a person behind it who decided it was worth $15 a month to have their calls fixed before the fact.

The referral link at $12.75 exists for the same reason rather than as a discount ladder: it rewards a trader whose record persuaded someone else to keep one.

What does the subscription actually include?

• Unlimited sealed commits, each with a delay you choose between 1 hour to 30 days.
• The Chrome extension, which reads what you already write and commits it — no broker connection, no import, no requirement to trade inside anyone's platform.
• A public profile carrying PnL, RME, correlation to SPX, mean R:R and trade count over 30, 100 and 200-day windows — or a private one, if you would rather share only the username as future proof.
• Merkle-anchored proof, checkable by anyone without kappi.
• RME form tracking from 11 closed trades onward.

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.

What is the real cost of not having a record?

Harder to price and usually larger. A trader with genuine skill and no artifact is indistinguishable, to anyone deciding whether to back them, from a trader without it — and that indistinguishability is what the $180 buys out of. Set against a paid room at $99 a month, which is $1,188 a year and a 23.8% hurdle on a $5,000 account, the recorder is the cheaper line item by a factor of 6.6.