IEX or SIP free account...Make a

Getting Started with Alpaca
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Somone else asked about “IEX or SIP with a free account” earlier…
You do not have to answer again.
Make SIP high volume testing stream so I can stress test my code….

I am going to take a few minutes out of my day to explain somethings for Alpaca that they may not understand about devs… As your potential customers need to have SOME experience with code, I hope what I am about to say lands….

  1. There is no such thing as a free account. Time is money, and I just spent quite a bit of time building and integrating websocket functionality that I can not test without upgrading. I get that there “REAL SIP DATA” costs Alpaca real money and requires a subscription. Make a simulated SIP stream so I can test consumption and processing bandwidth. Don’t be shady by ommitting this in documentation. And absolutely do not make it worse by adding “use (FAKEPACA) for testing”, at the exact place in the documentation where an explanation, and testing solution should be.

  2. Some of us devs, despite having 20 years experience writing code, are new to algo trading. The ONLY reason any dev signs up with Alpaca is for algo trading. Maybe a small percentage of devs truly are not interested in DAY TRADING, but EVERY LAST DEV has either thought about it or already tried it and I’d bet my entire schwab investment account that >80% of Alpaca customers signed up with the expectation to be able to do so. The frequency of “Cash Account” posts here in the forums make me pretty confident that i would win that bet.

Now, I am new here. And to be clear, I have no problem upgrading my account to stress test my code, because I only intend on using Alpaca for data…..not trades (remember…. schwab account) However, do want to state that I believe Alpaca is dangerously close to becoming no different than any other “bait and switch” product for devs. Your marketing and branding leans very heavily on algo trading, and has a very high density of keywords devs love like API, Websocket, Real Time Data, etc. and conveniently neglects to clarify that cash account algo day trading is not really possible. (Hmmm… i wonder if it’s intentional)

I am still holding on to some glimmer of hope that Alpaca truly is a fintech company of devs for devs.

The ridiculous thing about it is…It seems like Alpaca thinks its more profitable to ommit than to be upfront…. Its not. Your upgraded account customers would still be here. On the othe hand, Had you clarified that testing day trading algos requires a subscription, and paying for a subscription grants you access to day trading every 2 to 3 days after settlement on a mandatory margin occurs…. a huge percentage of Alpaca’s free account users would never have created accounts and Alpaca would have lower customer service costs, and lower bandwith, storage, system costs. Again i’d bet my entire schwab investment account…… that your dormant free account users out number your active free account users and upgraded account users atleast 2 to 1,. and…… Again, the lack of posts here in the forums leads me to believe that would be a safe bet.

One more item then I am done….. Alpaca is a high level fintect product….. that does not how to use discord??? Seriously? PULL THE DAMN DISCORD LINK FROM THE FORUMS! You gave up on discord. likely because it made Alpaca employees to accessible and was interupting their free time during business hours. I have no problem with some laziness…. until that laziness has me, and a couple hundered other people wasting our time, and feeling like dumb asses becasue we scrolled all the way up to the top of the threads list, read the directions, clicked an emoji, then created a new thread asking for manual verification because clicking the emoji that was intended to verify we were human was broken.

Holy Fck….So close to being a scam and a joke…. please, dont be scam and a joke. You know what to do.

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@VengeanceTFN Thank you for your deliberative feedback. You made a few comments and I’ll try to address them.

“Make a simulated SIP stream so I can test consumption and processing bandwidth.”
That is available. Use the endpoint v2/delayed_sip. That includes the same data as in the v2/sip stream but his simply delayed 15 minutes due to licensing. There is documentation on that here.

“PULL THE DAMN DISCORD LINK FROM THE FORUMS!”
Alpaca does not actively post on discord primarily due to regulatory concerns. FINRA requires brokers to maintain copies of all public and private conversations. That became challenging on the discord platform so a decision was made to limit our public presence to Reddit, Slack, the Forums here, and to a lesser extent LinkedIn, and of course directly emailing Alpaca support at support@alpaca.markets. Where do you see a link to discord and I can get it removed.

I’ll also be happy to address any of your other issues if you could specifically identify them.

Again thank you for your feedback, but sad to hear that you seem to have had a bad first experience with Alpaca. We’d like to get a second chance to fix that.

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@Dan_Whitnable_Alpaca In all honesty…. At this point, I’m still hopefull Alpaca will be the solution i’ve been looking for.

I will try the delayed sip today and reply back.

Regarding discord.. delete the spaces in the link after pasting in a browser (added spaces so google does not seo boost for the “alpaca discord” search results because thats how i found it)

forums. alpaca. markets/t/access-to-discord-community/10376

I would not say that my experience has been bad…but as a developer that has used SOOOOOOO many products for developers and seen the insanely high percentage of “ommission” that occurs, I am still hopeful Alpaca is the diamond in the rough that it appears to be. Again, I do not believe I will be using the trading functionailty, but if I had made it this far into coding for use with alpaca’s trading functionality, and learned about the day trading/cash account issue, I can not say i would feel the same, and I think YOU are aware of that sentiment across your users….I will say. I believe YOU are attempting to resolve that issue, be it directly or creatively. As well, I am impressed with your dedication to supporting the forums.and think you are doing a great job of liaising between your customers and the poweres that be. So thank you.

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@Dan_Whitnable_Alpaca
side note/question about delyed sip. Does the 15 minute delay keep the flow rate of the data intact?

I guess I mean, there must be variations in the tx rate and “dead air” time that data is being trasnitted over sip. is the tx rate and “dead air” time kept intact on the delayed sip?

And come to think of it, what is the max tx rate alpaca can output to an individual websocket client?

I guess i can i can record and retransmit the data from a node on the same network to simulate Alpaca’s max tx rate, but if there are micro bursts and down time (be it microseconds) it would be useful to know how much to maybe add some additional data prep functionality before housing the data If that makes sense….