Custom Coding Service
Where to get automated robot or indicator?
We often receive inquiries for custom coding of indicators and robots for MT4 (MQL4), MT5 (MQL5), and cTrader platforms. However, we focus on developing and maintaining our own indicators and expert advisors. This allows us to keep them up-to-date and useful to the majority of traders, avoiding critical bugs as much as possible. Thus, unfortunately, we cannot work on custom coding requests from traders.
As a result, if you want to order a custom indicator or strategy programmed for MetaTrader or any other trading platform, you can choose from the following options:
- Freelancer websites
- Forums
- Specialized websites
Freelancer websites
Websites such as PeoplePerHour and Fiverr let you connect with skilled freelancers all over the world to do a specified job for you. You can either search through freelancers' profiles and their offers or publish your own job to attract many freelancers and choose the best proposal.
When talking about custom coding for MT4, MT5, cTrader, and so on, such websites host hundreds of capable freelancers who will be glad to do the job for you.
Ordering your custom indicator or expert advisor from such a service is a good idea because you can post a project and receive numerous proposals, and then select the one that best suits your needs, judging by the freelancer's proficiency level, reviews, and rates.
Another good thing about using a third-party website is that they offer a mediation/escrow service, which helps to receive what you ordered before releasing the payment to the coder.
The disadvantage, of course, is that you are paying extra for the service provided by the website (10-20%).
Forums
It is easy to find enthusiastic coders on Forex forums. They won't charge much, but the result is often of subpar quality and it is easy to get scammed.
Yet this is probably the cheapest way to get your trading idea coded — be it MT4, MT5, TradingView (Pine Script), or something else.
Specialized websites
Specialized websites, like Emet Trading Solutions where you can order trading system development is perhaps the most high-quality option of all.
Such websites value their reputation, which is earned through years, so there is little chance of fraud. However, you need to remember that there is no mediation or arbitrage, which means that sometimes you won't be getting the product you expected to get and you won't be able to do anything about that.
This is also the most expensive path you could take because such services usually rely on full-time professional coders. Meanwhile, this ensures rather fast results.
With a specialized coding service website, you are also getting a kind of warranty and technical support in case you discover a bug in the script's code sometime later.
Conclusions on custom coding services
It is up to you to decide which method of getting your trading program coded is best for you. Ultimately, it depends on what you need done, what your budget is, and how much time you are ready to wait to get a working piece of software.
Here are some imaginary scenarios that could help you decide where to request your custom code:
You need to add alerts to your indicator (and you have .mq4 or .mq5 files for that indicator).
In most cases, this can be done even by non-coders, using our alerts tutorial. If that fails, the optimal choice would be to find a coder on forums — usually, this is a rather quick and cheap job, so there is little point in overcomplicating it. Such job rarely costs more than $20-$50.
Of course, things get different if the indicator has many data buffers, if you want complex alert conditions, or if you want to code it for a less popular trading platform (NinjaTrader, Thinkorswim, TradeStation, Sierra Chart, Interactive Brokers, etc.). In this case, it is probably best to opt for a freelance service.
You need to covert an indicator or an EA from MT4 to MT5 (from MQL4 to MQL5).
This could be a fairly easy task, which your forum buddy would agree to do for a token fee, or this could be a more difficult task if the indicator (or the expert advisor) uses some poorly convertible subroutines. In this case, it is a great task for freelancers. You should expect to pay around $100-$200, depending on the scale of the project's complexity.
You have a working indicator and want a trading strategy based on this indicator implemented as an expert advisor.
Depending on the system's difficulty, this task can be done either by someone you can find on forums or by freelancer coders. Such tasks rarely require a big team or hundreds of man-hours to complete. The price will vary depending on the coding language involved (the task is trivial in Pine Script, for example).
You need a minor modification in the source code of the existing indicator or expert advisor.
This particularly depends on how "minor" the modification is, but forum participants can probably tackle this unless you are reluctant to share the source code of the program you want modified. In that case, your best choice would be a freelancer who will sign an NDA (a non-disclosure agreement). That is where working with a freelancing website comes handy — they normally support NDAs from the get-go.
You need to develop a custom indicator, expert advisor, or dashboard from scratch.
If the program you need is simple enough, a freelancer service will offer you the best price-quality ratio. However, anything more or less complex is best left to professional teams that will work with you on mutually agreed conditions, adequate pricing, and post-purchase customer service. The cost of the deal here can reach as high as thousands of USD, so you should be prepared to pay a hefty sum for professional development.
As you can see, different ways of getting your trading or analytical idea custom-coded fit different use cases. It makes little sense to ask some random coder on a forum to create a fully customized EA with a control panel for you. At the same time, it is unlikely that the price charged by a specialized team of coders will competitive with freelancers or forum coders when you just need to add some alerts to an indicator.
