I run an algo trading service, a Claude Code OS product, a prompt-training platform, a skills marketplace, and two daily newsletters. One person.
Before I started using AI coding tools seriously, I paid for four analyst subscriptions:
| Tool | What it was for |
|---|---|
| Bloomberg Terminal (shared) | Data feeds and news |
| Koyfin Pro | Dashboards and charts (Koyfin pricing →) |
| TrendSpider Premium | Technical charting (TrendSpider pricing →) |
| Benzinga Essential | Newsroom and market news |
I don't pay any of that now. Here's what replaced it.
This is the most important line item. Claude Code is the reason one person can run six companies. Every repetitive decision, every dashboard build, every piece of customer content starts as a prompt to Claude and ends as shipped code.
What it replaces: hiring a junior developer and a copywriter and an analyst. One Claude subscription does the work of three people, because the work is now "tell Claude what you need, verify, ship."
Annoying detail: Anthropic's newer Opus models can use more tokens than older versions for the same work. Same rate card, so the real bill per session goes up. Watch your usage if you're running large CLAUDE.md files. (See Brainfile for how I manage this.)
Free, official, comprehensive. I use it for: recession probability, GDPNow, CPI (including the Atlanta flexible series), DXY, AAII sentiment, consumer sentiment, balance sheet + M2 + reverse repo, Fed funds forecasts.
What it replaces: every "macro dashboard" feature in Bloomberg / Koyfin / TrendSpider that's just visualizing FRED data with a fancier UI. The data is free. The UI was the subscription fee.
I pull SPX gamma exposure, put/call ratios, VIX term structure, and dealer positioning. The specific service isn't the point — any GEX data service covers what the "options flow" premium tier of most brokerages sells.
Free global news sentiment feed from the University of Illinois. I use it to track macro narrative flow, geopolitical risk, and sector sentiment. Raw data, not curated — but Claude Code can parse it.
Charts, basic screeners, watchlist alerts. Doesn't have the analyst tools the expensive tiers advertise, but I don't need them — my own algo does the analysis.
Raw OHLC price data for the algo. This is the one that actually matters — everything downstream depends on clean price data. Polygon.io is now called Massive (the rename →); current plans: Massive pricing →.
Two of the six are free. Together they replace the four legacy subscriptions, plus they do things none of them could (generate content, ship code, run backtests on demand).
Being honest about the tradeoff:
The tradeoff is: I pay with my time and Claude's tokens to get custom versions of what they had. For six companies running lean, that tradeoff is correct.
The stack works because Claude Code is the glue. When I need a new analysis, I don't switch tools — I tell Claude "pull FRED DXY + GDELT tariff sentiment + our options flow data, and tell me if the regime has changed in the last 72 hours." It writes the code, runs it, gives me the answer.
That's the real multiplier. It's not that each tool is cheaper individually — it's that I don't have to context-switch between five dashboards. The analysis comes to me, synthesized.
Start with Claude Code on a Claude Pro plan, FRED (free) and a lower TradingView plan (TradingView pricing →). That replaces the research tier of most brokerages. Add Massive (formerly Polygon.io) or a GEX service when the free data isn't enough.
Get the full configs I use →Brainfile sells the Claude Code configurations + agents that run this stack for you. Customer runs it in their own environment — no compute cost to us, you keep your data private.
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