Building a marketplace where indicator authors actually get paid

TradingView has an indicator marketplace. Thousands of paid scripts. A functioning revenue split. On paper, it's exactly what the TradingView ecosystem needed.

In practice, it's a cautionary tale about how marketplaces fail their supply side.

How TradingView's split works

TradingView takes a flat 50% of every script sale. The author gets 50%. There's no negotiation, no scaling, no alternative tiers.

That sounds reasonable until you think about what a successful script actually costs to maintain. A popular Pine Script indicator that hundreds of traders depend on has:

• An author who answers support questions in the comments
• An author who fixes bugs when TradingView changes Pine syntax
• An author who keeps the indicator current as new edge cases emerge
• An author who would, ideally, write documentation and provide examples

That maintenance is uncompensated by TradingView's split. The author does it because they want a good review score, which drives future sales. The author eats the maintenance cost because the alternative is a one-star review and a dead listing.

The perverse incentive

The result is a marketplace optimised for volume of indicators, not quality of indicators.

An author who publishes 50 mediocre indicators at 0 each, neglects all of them, and lives off the long tail of low-effort sales does better than an author who publishes one excellent indicator at 00 and supports it properly.

The marketplace is full of the former. The latter — the indicators that actually solve real trader problems — get buried, because their authors can't afford the time investment the split demands.

What Deepwick's marketplace does differently

Three structural changes.

1. We make our cut on the marketplace, not on the platform subscription

Deepwick's subscription gives you the platform: full-tick M1 history, the overfitting test, alerts, the chart itself. Indicators on the marketplace are paid separately. The platform subscription doesn't subsidise the marketplace; the marketplace is its own business.

This means we have no incentive to over-charge on the marketplace cut to make the platform subscription look cheaper. The two revenue streams are independent.

2. Authors can set their own price

There is no TradingView-mandated price band. An author can charge , 00, or ,000. The marketplace takes a percentage; the author keeps the rest.

We don't have an opinion on what a strategy is worth. The market does.

3. The overfitting test is a public signal

Every script on the marketplace has its overfitting test verdict attached. Buyers can compare scripts on robustness, not just on Sharpe ratio. Scripts with a robust verdict trade at a premium; scripts with a likely overfit verdict are flagged.

This isn't a quality gate — we don't reject scripts that fail the overfitting test. We make the failure visible. Buyers get to choose. Authors with robust scripts get to advertise that. The marketplace becomes self-policing in a way TradingView's doesn't.

What an author actually earns

Here's a worked example. Say an author publishes a robust London Reversal strategy for EURUSD. They price it at 49 one-time.

• Sale price: 49
• Marketplace cut: 15%
• Author receives: 26.65

If the script sells 100 copies in a year, the author earns 2,665. That's not retirement money, but it's enough to justify the time to support the indicator properly. It's also enough to make writing the next indicator — the one with a real edge, not just a good backtest — economically rational.

Compare to TradingView's split: same 49 sale, 4.50 to the author. The author needs to sell ~170 copies to make the same money.

What we won't do

We won't bundle authors' scripts into "Pro" subscriptions where the author gets paid by some opaque formula based on usage. That model punishes authors whose scripts are valued but rarely used (e.g., a niche-metals strategy).

We won't run "featured script" programs that bury organic discovery. If an indicator is featured, it will be featured because of its overfitting test verdict and its user rating, not because the author paid for placement.

We won't change the marketplace cut retroactively. The 15% rate is the rate. Contracts will say so.

Who this is for

If you have an indicator that's been working for years and you've been thinking about charging for it, the Deepwick marketplace is built for you. The platform handles billing, refunds, support triage, and the overfitting test. You write the indicator, set the price, and collect.

If you're a trader who's been burned by TradingView scripts that stopped working, the marketplace gives you a way to compare scripts on robustness before you buy. No more paying 00 for an indicator with a 600% in-sample return that vanishes the moment you go live.

This is the structural reason Deepwick has the overfitting test built in as a platform feature, not as a paid add-on. The marketplace depends on it. The platform's trustworthiness depends on it. Every other feature we ship — alerts, real-time data, the desktop app — depends on the marketplace having integrity.

The next post in this series covers how we're handling the real-time data question for the launch — specifically the FX and metals side, where retail traders have the fewest good options today.

— Enrique