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How Much Does a Forex Robot Cost? Expert Advisor Prices, Rent and Custom Builds
At a glance
A forex robot price for MetaTrader 5 ranges from nothing to $999 on the MQL5 Market. Among the first 700 Expert Advisors listed on 31 October 2026, 108 were free and the median paid one cost $197.50; on the first three pages it was $299. 65 of 176 paid EAs we checked could be rented, a month for a median 40% of the purchase price and a year for 74%. A custom EA on MQL5 Freelance had a median posted budget of $30 to $150 across 167 jobs, with 40 applicants each. Add a VPS at about $10 to $15 a month and the trading costs, which an EA pays on every trade.
On this page
“How much does a forex robot cost?” has four answers, depending on how you get it: you buy it, rent it, have it written, or get it without a licence fee. Each comes with costs that are not in the price, and the largest of them, trading costs, appears on no price tag at all.
This guide puts dated numbers on each route for MetaTrader 5. They come from three counts we made on 31 October 2026: purchase prices of the first 700 Expert Advisors on the MQL5 Market, rent prices on 176 product pages, and posted budgets of 167 custom-EA jobs on MQL5 Freelance.
Disclosure: RoboXpert sells trading software in two of the ways described here: Risk Guard is listed on the MQL5 Market at $79, and our EAs Daybreak, BTC Weekend and SkyWebR have no licence fee because we receive rebates from a partner broker. We say below what that means for you. AI assisted with research, counting and drafting. See our editorial methodology.
How much does a forex robot cost?
The table gives the range for each route, with the figure we measured. It excludes the cost of a computer that keeps MetaTrader running and the trading costs, which come on top of every route.
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| Route | What you pay for the EA | Measured on 31 October 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Buy on the MQL5 Market | A one-off price, for a set number of computers | 108 of the first 700 free; median paid price $197.50, on the first three pages $299; none above $999 |
| Rent on the MQL5 Market | 1, 3, 6 or 12 months, where the seller offers it | 65 of 176 paid EAs rentable; one month a median 40% of the purchase price |
| Have one written | The agreed price for your specification | Median posted budget $30 to $150 across 167 Freelance jobs; 12 named $1,000 or more |
| Without a licence fee | Nothing for the EA; the seller earns through a broker | Our own model for three EAs; costs moved to the broker account (see below) |
Building an EA yourself with an AI assistant costs the subscription and your time; our MT5 EA built with AI shows what that involves.
Forex robot price on the MQL5 Market
The MQL5 Market is the largest shop for MetaTrader EAs and the only one that publishes all its prices. On 31 October 2026 its category page listed 17,874 Expert Advisors for MT5. We read the purchase price of the first 700, the first ten pages in the order the page shows by default.
Three things stand out. Prices cluster between $50 and $500: 467 of the 592 paid EAs fall in that range. The front of the list is dearer than the rest: the 210 EAs on the first three pages had a median price of $299, the same as in our count of 7 October 2026, while all 700 had $197.50. And no EA in our sample cost more than $999, although several descriptions announced a “final price” above it.
A purchase buys a licence for a number of computers, not for accounts. On the 176 paid product pages we read, the seller allowed 10 activations in the median case; 22 allowed the minimum of 5 and 21 the maximum of 20. A new VPS or a reinstalled Windows uses one up. Our guide to reading an MQL5 Market page explains activations, refunds and launch prices.
Renting an EA instead of buying it
Renting looks like the cheap way in. The numbers show when it is and when it is not. Of the 176 paid EAs whose product pages we read, 65 offered a rental. 47 offered one month, 26 three months, 8 six months and 18 a full year. The median price for one month was $95.
The median ratios, in the table below, decide which choice is cheaper for how long you plan to use the EA:
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| Rental period | Median price as share of the purchase price | Cheaper than buying if you stop after |
|---|---|---|
| 1 month | 40% | 1 or 2 months |
| 3 months | 53% | 3 months |
| 6 months | 61% | 6 months |
| 1 year | 74% | 1 year, if you then stop |
A month's rental is therefore a paid trial: long enough to run the EA on a demo account and see whether its live trades resemble the backtest. Kept for longer, monthly rent overtakes the purchase price in the third month.
Custom EA development on MQL5 Freelance
If you have your own rules, you can have them written. MQL5 Freelance is the platform's job board: you post a specification with a budget, developers apply, and the money is held until you accept the work. On 31 October 2026 its public list showed 167 jobs in the category Experts.
The median job named $30 at the low end and, where it gave a range, $150 at the top; a quarter of the ranges ended at $325 or more, and 12 jobs named $1,000 or more. Each job drew a median of 40 applications. These are the budgets customers post; the price finally agreed is not shown on the job pages.
Three rules on the Freelance rules page matter more than the budget:
- Commission: the developer receives the agreed amount “less 10% commission”. If either side calls in arbitration, 10% of the customer's held money is kept as a fee whoever wins, even when the job is cancelled in the customer's favour.
- Arbitration looks only at your specification. The rules say “the basis for decision making is only the Requirements Specification.” A vague specification is the most expensive mistake you can make here.
- Rights and source code: unless the specification says otherwise, “all the exclusive rights to the ordered software belong to the Customer.” The rules say the work is delivered “by way of providing files”, not that the source code is among them. If you want the editable MQ5 file and not only the compiled EX5, write it into the specification.
Free EAs and EAs without a licence fee
A free EA costs nothing to download, but free is not the same as costless. 108 of the first 700 Market listings were free; MetaTrader itself ships 34 trading EAs with source code, which we tested in our guide to free Expert Advisors for MT5.
A second kind has no licence fee because the seller is paid another way, usually through a broker. That is how our own Daybreak, BTC Weekend and SkyWebR work: you open an account through our partner-broker link, and we receive rebates from the broker on the trading in that account. For you this means three things. You pay the broker's normal spreads, commissions and swaps on every trade; the EA's “price” is part of the broker's revenue from them. You are tied to the brokers in the arrangement, so compare their conditions as you would any broker's; our broker checklist for EAs shows how. And the seller earns more the more you trade, which is a reason to check that an EA does not trade more than its strategy needs.
What an EA costs in its first year
The price of the EA is often not the largest item. Two costs come with every route: a computer that keeps MetaTrader running day and night, and the trading costs of every order. The table adds them up for a hypothetical first year, using the medians above.
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| First year, hypothetical | EA | MetaTrader VPS, 12 months | Total before trading costs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Buy at the median front-page price | $299 | $120 | $419 |
| Buy at the median price of all 700 | $197.50 | $120 | $317.50 |
| Rent for a year (74% of $299) | $221 | $120 | $341 |
| Rent month by month (12 × 40% of $299) | $1,435 | $120 | $1,555 |
| Custom build at the median upper budget | $150 | $120 | $270 |
| No licence fee | $0 | $120 | $120 |
The VPS line uses the MetaTrader VPS price of $120 for twelve months, or $15 for one month, that we read on 21 September 2026 for our VPS comparison. A custom build usually needs revisions, and your time writing and testing the specification is not in the table.
Trading costs are left out because they depend on the EA, not on how you got it. An EA that trades often can pay more in spreads and commissions in a year than any price in this table. Our test of how sensitive EAs are to trading costs shows how much one point of spread can change a result.
What we did not check
- We counted listed prices and posted budgets, not what buyers paid after discounts or what customers and developers agreed.
- The Market sample is the first 700 listings in the default order on one day, not a random sample of all 17,874. Rent and activations come from the 176 paid product pages on the first three pages.
- We did not count Expert Advisors sold outside the MQL5 Market, on sellers' own websites or other platforms, where prices are often not public.
- We did not commission a custom EA for this guide.
Frequently asked questions
How much does a forex robot cost? On the MQL5 Market on 31 October 2026, the median paid MT5 Expert Advisor among the first 700 cost $197.50, and 108 of the 700 were free. None in that sample cost more than $999.
Is it cheaper to rent or buy an EA? For one or two months, renting; for longer, buying. At the median prices we counted, monthly rent passes the purchase price in the third month, while a year's rental costs about three quarters of it.
How much does it cost to have an EA programmed? Posted budgets on MQL5 Freelance had a median of $30 to $150; a quarter of the ranges ended at $325 or more and 12 of 167 jobs named $1,000 or more. Ask for the MQ5 source code in the specification.
What does an EA cost besides its price? A VPS at about $10 to $15 a month to keep MetaTrader running, and the trading costs of every order, which for an active EA can exceed everything else.
Sources & further reading
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