Is FX Replay Free? What the Beginner Plan Really Includes

Short answer: yes, FX Replay has a free plan called Beginner, and no, it is not a plan you can run a backtesting routine on. It allows 2 sessions, 50 records, 1 week of data retention, a 1-month session duration, 1 indicator, and 1 screenshot plus 1 checklist in the journal. That is a demo licence with a generous label - which is a legitimate way to build a product, but it is worth knowing before you plan a month of testing around it.

Every FX Replay tier, with the numbers

Read from the FX Replay pricing page on 31 August 2026. Prices are USD and change over time, so treat the table as a snapshot rather than a quote.

Two structural things fall out of that table. First, the jump from free to paid is not one feature - it is six meters relaxing at once, which is why the free plan feels tight so quickly. Second, almost everything genuinely distinctive about the product - unlimited AI, futures and CME data, seconds-level intervals, custom timeframes - lives on the $35 Pro tier, not on the $17.99 middle one. Intermediate is a bigger version of the free plan; Pro is the different product.

The retention clock, and why it is the limit that hurts

Five of the six free limits block you from doing more. One of them takes away what you have already done: 1 week data retention. That is different in kind, and it is the reason the free plan does not support a routine.

Backtesting only produces an answer at sample size. A usable sample is around 100 trades for a single setup, and a working trader gathering those in evening sessions typically needs three to six weeks. With a seven-day window, trade 1 is gone before trade 60 exists. You never hold a hundred trades at once, so you never see the expectancy, profit factor or drawdown numbers that were the entire point of the exercise. The 50-record cap compounds it: 50 records is roughly half a sample even before the clock starts.

Read charitably, the design is coherent. A one-week window makes the free plan an evaluation licence - enough to see whether you like the charting, the replay controls and the journal - and it is honest that the paid tier is where the work happens. It just means the free plan answers "do I like this tool?" rather than "does my strategy have an edge?", and those get confused often.

What you can realistically finish on the free plan

Concretely, here is what the Beginner tier supports. You can open two sessions - say EURUSD on H1 and gold on H4 - and log up to fifty trades between them with one indicator on the chart. Inside a single week you can complete one genuine mini-test: pick one setup, run it for fifty trades, screenshot the result, and write the numbers down somewhere outside the platform before the week expires. That is a legitimate use and it is more than most free demos allow.

What it does not support is the thing that actually changes trading results: a repeating weekly routine where each session adds to a growing record you can slice later by pair, by session, by day of week, by setup tag. That routine is a months-long accumulation, and it is structurally incompatible with a seven-day window.

Which paid tier is the right one

If you have decided FX Replay is your tool, the choice between the two paid tiers is mostly a question about your time horizon. Intermediate at $17.99 fits a trader testing one to three strategies who is comfortable with 200 records per session and a six-month retention window - which is long enough to build a real sample and review it, but not long enough to compare this year's results to last year's. Pro at $35 earns the difference in four specific cases: you want a permanent record you will still be able to query in two years; you run more than three indicators; you trade futures and need CME data; or you work off sub-minute charts. Outside those four, the extra $17 a month buys ceiling you will not touch.

One thing worth pricing honestly: the annual plans save real money. $180/year against $215.88 monthly on Intermediate, $350/year against $420 on Pro. But an annual commitment to a backtesting tool made in month one is a bet on a habit you have not formed yet, and unformed habits are the single most common way traders waste money on trading software. Pay monthly until you have logged three consecutive weeks of sessions. If the habit sticks, switch to annual then and lose nothing but a few pounds of the discount.

Backtesting cost, viewed against the alternative uses of the money

There is a version of this decision that is not about features at all. $35/month is $420 a year. For a trader with a $2,000 account risking 1% per trade, that is 21 R of annual cost - a meaningful hurdle a strategy has to clear before it pays for its own testing tool. For a funded trader or someone on a five-figure account, it is negligible and not worth a second thought. The tier that is right for you depends more on account size than on feature lists, and the industry rarely says so.

That is also the honest frame for the free-plan question. The reason to want a genuinely usable free tier is not thrift - it is that the first hundred trades are the ones that decide whether you keep going, and charging for them puts the paywall exactly where the drop-off already is.

If the free tier is the sticking point

This is where we have a stake, so read it with that in mind. FxBacktest was built with the meters set the other way round: the free plan unlocks all 93 instruments and all seven timeframes from M1 to D1, with full trade execution, automatic risk-based position sizing, and the complete session report - overall score, profit factor, Sharpe, expected payoff, win rate, average RR, expectancy, recovery factor, max drawdown in dollars and R, consecutive win and loss streaks, average trade duration. The free caps are 3 saved sessions and 1 simultaneous indicator, and there is no retention clock: what you save stays saved. Paid tiers are €12/month for multi-timeframe charts, 3 indicators and 30 sessions, and €39/month for unlimited everything plus the deeper analytics.

The trade-off is real and it runs against us on coverage: FX Replay carries 120+ forex pairs, futures with CME data, bonds, commodities, seconds-level candles and history back to 2003. We carry 93 instruments from 2009-2017 depending on the market, with 1 minute as the lowest timeframe and no futures at all. If your strategy needs any of that, the free-tier argument is irrelevant to you. The full feature-by-feature breakdown is in the FX Replay alternative comparison; this page is only about what the plans cost and cap.

Bottom line

FX Replay's free plan is real but it is an evaluation licence, not a working tier - two sessions, fifty records, and a seven-day retention window that removes the accumulating record backtesting exists to build. Intermediate at $17.99 is where it becomes usable; Pro at $35 is where it becomes the product the marketing describes, and it is the only tier with futures, seconds charts and permanent history. Decide by asking two questions in order: does the free plan let me finish a hundred trades and still see them - and if not, is the tier that does cheaper than the alternative that already lets me? Answer those honestly and the pricing page stops being confusing.