No free tier, so price the free routes honestly

No. On 6 October 2026, TradeZella's pricing page showed only paid plans, with no free tier and no trial. The entry plan was listed at $35 a month, or $315 a year billed annually. Two higher tiers sat above it.

Prices and offers change, so open the pricing page yourself before deciding. Promotions come and go. A refund policy, if there is one, lives in their help pages rather than on the plan cards.

The practical problem is testing. You can't load a month of your own trades and see whether the reports change anything before you pay. If you want to journal without paying, you need a different route. The two common ones are a spreadsheet you build yourself and the reports your broker already gives you.

A spreadsheet costs nothing and does exactly what you tell it. Give each trade a row: date, symbol, side, size, entry, exit, P&L. Add a column for one sentence on why you took it.

The basic stats are a handful of formulas. Win rate is winners divided by all trades. Average winner and average loser are averages of each group. Expectancy is total P&L divided by the number of trades. A pivot table by date gives you a crude calendar of daily results.

The weak point is entry. Every fill gets typed or pasted by hand, and partial fills turn one trade into several rows. Mistakes stay invisible because nothing checks them. A spreadsheet works well at a few trades a week. At several a day, the typing starts to eat the time you meant to spend reviewing.

Your broker already records every fill. Look for a realized P&L report and a CSV export of executions. That's an accurate record you didn't have to type.

What it lacks is a view built for review. A statement lists trades in time order. It won't group your days into a calendar or mark which days were FOMC or options expiry. It won't show whether your losers are held longer than your winners. It won't compare trades after a win with trades after a loss.

The common fix is a hybrid. Export the CSV once a week and paste it into your spreadsheet. That removes the typing but keeps the formula upkeep. It's a reasonable free setup, as long as you keep it up.

Free journaling is paid for in minutes, so put a number on them. Use your own counts in place of these.

Say you take 10 trades a day and spend 90 seconds logging each by hand. That's 15 minutes a day, or 75 minutes across a five-day week. Over 50 trading weeks it adds up to 62.5 hours a year.

The broker-export hybrid shrinks that. If pasting and checking the weekly CSV takes 20 minutes, the year costs about 17 hours. Whether either number is worth a subscription depends on what your hour is worth. It also depends on whether you'd actually review the data once it's in. Count the review time separately. Logging is only the first half of the job. A journal nobody reads is expensive at any price.

Whichever tool you look at, test it on your own trades. A demo account with sample data shows you the interface, not your habits.

Check four things in the first week. Do your trades import from your broker without manual fixes? Do the stats you'd actually read appear without setup? Does the calendar show your real daily P&L? Can you export your data if you leave?

Where there's no trial, ask support about refunds in writing before paying. Then put a reminder in your calendar a few days before renewal. Annual billing is cheaper per month, but only if you're still using the tool in month nine. Start monthly until you know.

Also check how the tool treats your instruments. Options and partial fills are where imports tend to break. Load a week that includes both, if you trade them, and compare the totals with your broker statement.

TraderLog is also a paid journal. The difference on this question is the trial: 14 days free, no card. You can load real trades and decide with your own numbers.

Trades import automatically from Schwab through its API and from IBKR through a Flex query. Other accounts can use CSV import. The stats page covers win rate, profit factor, expectancy, max drawdown and results per symbol. Habit findings flag patterns like losers held longer than winners, or size jumping after a loss.

Some parts cost nothing at all. The calculators for expectancy, position size and max drawdown are free. So is the Morning Map, which emails SPY, QQQ and IWM zones at 8:40 ET. Use those even if you stay on a spreadsheet.