Which Sierra Chart Package Should You Buy? (And the Real Monthly Cost)
Five packages, numbered up to 12, no names. The answer is Package 11 — here's why the other four are dead ends for intraday futures, and the real all-in monthly bill: about $50, not the $46 sticker. Plus the $145 account-requirement trap and the prepaid-billing gotcha.
Published August 2026: the Sierra Chart setup decision, made honestly — which package to buy, why the other four are wrong for intraday futures, and my actual monthly bill on screen instead of the sticker price. This is the written companion to the video above.
You went to buy Sierra Chart, hit the packages page, and found five packages numbered up to twelve. Numbers, not names. No "most people pick this one." So here's the answer up front, the same way the video gives it:
Buy Package 11 — Integrated Advanced. If you trade intraday futures, trade prop firm accounts, or want to build anything automated on top of the platform, that's the package. The rest of this post is why, plus the number the pricing table doesn't show you.
Code was never the wall. Data is.
The thing that surprises most people: every package runs your own custom code. Custom studies, custom chartbooks, ACSIL — none of it is gated by package. If the plan was "buy the cheap one and code my way up," the platform actually lets you.
What's gated is everything you'd want to run that code on:
- The Denali data feed — Sierra's bundled feed, with roughly ten years of tick history. Only the Integrated packages (10, 11, 12) can connect to it. If you ever want to backtest on real tick data, this is the whole game.
- External services — Rithmic, IB, CQG, and the routing your prop firm account lives on. Base packages can't connect to any of them.
So the Base packages aren't "starter" versions of the same platform. For a live futures trader they're dead ends — not because they're weak, but because they can't reach the data or the accounts that matter.
The five packages, decoded
| Package | Price/mo | What it is | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 | $26 | Basic functionality, nothing advanced | Fine for kicking the tires. Still wouldn't |
| 5 | $36 | Adds TPO, Numbers Bars, Numbers Bars Calculated Values, market depth, volume profile | Looks advanced — still can't connect to Denali or any external service |
| 10 | $36 | Integrated: Denali + external connections, base feature set | The same price as 5. Read that again |
| 11 | $46 | Integrated + the full advanced feature set | The one |
| 12 | — | Adds Market by Order | Niche. If you don't already know you need MBO, you don't |
The $36 collision is the sharpest fact on the page: Package 5 and Package 10 cost exactly the same, and one of them is a dead end. Five has the prettier feature list; ten has the connections that make the platform worth running. If those two prices force the decision logic into the open, 11 is just the honest conclusion — ten dollars more for the full toolset on top of the connectivity.
One relief valve on the software price: Sierra offers prepay discounts at three, six, and twelve months. Pay the year up front and Package 11 drops from $46 to about $30 a month.
The number the table doesn't show
The $46 sticker is not your bill. Sierra's packages don't include exchange data — that's a separate line item per market, and it's where most people either overpay or get surprised.
For a futures trader on CME products, the tier that matters is CME with market depth, non-professional: $13.50/month. Not the Full CME Group bundle at $40.50. ES and NQ trade on CME proper — the full bundle adds CBOT, NYMEX, and COMEX, which is $27 a month, $324 a year, most people hand over for data they never open. Trade CL or GC? Then you need it. Trading index futures? You don't.
I also run the VIX as part of my process, so I add the CBOE index feed at $6/month.
| Line item | Worst case (month-to-month) | My actual bill (yearly prepay) |
|---|---|---|
| Package 11 software | $46.00 | $29.90 |
| CME data, non-pro, with depth | $13.50 | $13.50 |
| CBOE indexes (VIX) | $6.00 | $6.00 |
| All-in per month | $65.50 | $49.40 |
Budget for the worst case; land at about fifty. Either way it's a rounding error against what this desk replaces — and you get real tick data with a decade of history, which is the thing the browser platforms can't sell you at any price.
The catch nobody warns you about: the account requirement
The exchanges require you to have a real brokerage account on file to buy the non-professional data feeds. Not funded and trading — just set up. I use AMP Futures, which connects to Denali directly.
This bites prop-firm traders specifically: if all your trading lives in funded accounts, you don't have a personal brokerage account with the exchanges, and without one that $13.50 feed becomes $145 a month. Opening the account is the cheap fix — you never have to trade it.
Related question I see on every forum: can I just use Sierra Chart for sim or analysis without a live account? Honest answer: no — the data feeds above are the reason, and it's a requirement from the exchanges, not a Sierra upsell. The genuinely cheap path is Package 5 with delayed data: no intraday feed, but you can learn the platform and build against it. I'd still go to 11 — watching live order flow move is the fastest education there is — but the delayed path is real and nobody should pretend otherwise.
Two more gotchas, then you're running
Billing is a prepaid balance, not a card subscription. You either make prepayments or authorize a recurring dollar amount in the account portal — there's no "subscribe" button like TradingView. It can lapse quietly. I prepay at the start of the year and set a reminder to refill.
The 21-day free trial is real but fenced. Limited history depth (no full backtests) and no external connections (no Rithmic, no prop routing). Still worth taking: learn the interface, understand the data format, and start building your custom code against it before a dollar leaves your pocket.
What this unlocks
The package decision is plumbing. The reason to get it right is what runs on top: Claude Code writing ACSIL studies against real tick data, signals you can parity-test against your own backtest, and eventually order management — the ORB study build is what that looks like end to end, and this is why the tick data matters more than the charts.
Next on the desk: Claude Code writes a study that watches the market, fires the signal, and places the order itself — start to finish, without me writing the C++.
The chartbook and the ORB study code from the last build are free — grab them here and they land in your inbox. Everything I teach is free: the method and the code in the repo. The paid layer is the assembled desk — the execution engine, the validated backtest kernel, the working files — never the methodology. I don't sell signals and I don't post live P&L. New to the desk? Start with why the pros backtest on Sierra Chart, not TradingView.