Most alert tools want a broker account before they will tell you that Bitcoin crossed a number. That is backwards. Watching a market and trading it are different activities, and only one of them needs your money on the table.
What runs without an account
chartTrigger's rule engine does not require a connected broker. The same evaluator that drives live orders also runs on a public market feed, which means a rule you write with no account is the same rule — same vocabulary, same conditions, same behaviour — as one armed on a terminal later.
With no broker connected you get:
- Live price alerts on crossings, breaks and retests of levels you draw.
- Indicator conditions, evaluated on real candles.
- Telegram, email and webhook delivery, with a chart image of the bar that fired.
- Paper fills, so a rule can record what it would have done.
- Historical simulation in the Proving Ground, on the same public history.
The one thing deliberately withheld is live order placement. A rule carrying order or close actions is refused on the public feed — refused at the point of arming, and stripped again in the engine as a second lock. No broker, no account, no order. That is a design decision, not a paywall.
Which markets are covered
| Asset class | Source | Tick quality |
|---|---|---|
| Crypto | Binance, and Bitstamp where the chart is drawing it | Real top-of-book, polled every few seconds, with a genuine bid and ask |
| Forex | Yahoo | Candle close (no cheap tick available) |
| Metals and energy | Yahoo | Candle close |
| Indices | Yahoo | Candle close |
| Shares | Yahoo | Candle close |
Three things that decide whether a free alert is worth having
Free price alerts are easy to build badly. These are the failure modes, and what a serious implementation does about each.
1. Reading the price off a candle instead of a tick
Candles do not need refreshing often — indicators only move when a bar closes, so a 30-to-60-second refresh cycle is fine for them. But if the trigger itself reads the newest candle's close, your alert is up to a minute behind the market. On crypto that is tens of dollars, and often the difference between catching a cross and missing it entirely.
chartTrigger separates the two. Indicators read candles; a price-cross trigger reads a tick store that polls top-of-book every few seconds and carries a real bid and ask. Where no cheap tick exists — the Yahoo-sourced symbols — it falls back to the candle close and, because bid equals ask there, a spread condition on those symbols is honestly meaningless rather than quietly wrong.
2. Serving stale data as if it were live
A public data source will happily hand you Friday's candle all weekend long. An alert system that does not notice this will evaluate rules against a market that is not open, and — worse — report "no signal" as though it had looked.
chartTrigger marks a symbol unavailable once its data is older than three times its own timeframe, and hides those rules rather than letting a generic "no live quote" message paper over the real reason. You are told the feed is stale, not told nothing happened.
3. The chart showing a different price from the rule
This is the subtle one, and it is expensive. If the chart draws one exchange's Bitcoin and the rule evaluates another's, a level you set by eye fires at the wrong price — the two can differ by tens of dollars.
So the price source honours the exchange the chart is drawing when it can serve it. Where a display symbol has no matching market we can fetch — the COMEX futures that back gold and oil, for instance — the price strip shows our price with the market named, so the number the rule uses is always the number on your screen.
Setting up your first alert
- Create an account — no card, no broker login.
- Open a chart. With nothing connected it opens on a live public feed, defaulting to Bitcoin.
- Draw a level, or pick a template.
- Choose the trigger: a cross, a break, a retest with a tolerance band.
- Pick a destination — Telegram, email or a webhook.
- Arm it. Close the tab; it keeps evaluating.
Does this cost you anything, or slow anything down?
One shared worker serves the public feed for everybody, because the candles for BTC/USD on a 15-minute chart are identical for every customer. It is not a process per user. The feed occupies no terminal capacity and is not billed as one, which is why it can simply be part of the product rather than a trial with a countdown.
When you do want orders
Connect a retail MetaTrader 5 account and the same rule can carry order actions. The terminal is provisioned and supervised for you — no VPS to rent, nothing to install. And before you arm anything live, Ghost Mode runs the rule end to end while recording instead of executing.
There is also a route where the membership is covered by a partner broker's introduction fee rather than a subscription; the details are on the pricing page, including exactly who pays what.
Common questions
Is it really free, or a trial?
Alerts, webhooks, paper fills and historical simulation on the public market feed do not require a connected broker account. Plans and any trial are set out on the pricing page.
Do I need to install anything?
No. It runs in a browser, and evaluation happens on hosted infrastructure, not in your tab.
Can a rule on the free feed place a trade?
No, by design. Order and close actions are refused on the public feed at arming and stripped again in the engine.
Set an alert in the next five minutes
No broker account, no VPS, no install. Draw a level on a live chart and have the alert reach your phone with a picture of the bar that fired.
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Risk note. This article is educational material about how chartTrigger works. It is not investment advice, not a recommendation to trade any instrument, and nothing here forecasts results. Trading leveraged products carries a high risk of loss. Any historical simulation referred to is exactly that — a run over past bars under stated spread and slippage assumptions, not an indication of future performance.