What to send when you ask for an EA quotation

2 October 2026 · Soft Trade Enterprises · All guides

Why the brief decides the price

A developer quoting your project is pricing uncertainty as much as work. "Buy when the trend is up" could be forty lines of code or four hundred, depending on what you mean by trend. If the brief leaves that open, the quote has to assume the expensive version — or the project runs over and someone ends up unhappy.

A precise brief is not bureaucracy. It is the cheapest thing you can do for yourself.

The seven things every brief needs

1. Platform and account type

MT5 or MT4. Netting or hedging. The broker. The exact symbol names as your terminal shows them — XAUUSD, XAUUSD.m and GOLD are three different strings to a program.

2. Entry conditions, in order

Write them as a numbered list, each one testable as true or false on a given bar. Not "when momentum builds" but "when the 14-period RSI on M15 crosses above 55". If a condition depends on another timeframe, say which.

3. Exit conditions — all of them

Stop loss, take profit, trailing rules, time-based exit, opposite-signal exit, end-of-session exit. Most briefs cover the stop and forget the other four, and every one of them is a decision the software has to make several times a day.

4. Position sizing

Fixed lot, percentage of balance, percentage of equity, risk-per-trade based on stop distance, or your own formula. If it is risk-based, say what happens when the calculated lot is below the broker minimum — skip the trade, or round up?

5. Limits

Maximum open positions. Maximum trades per day. Maximum consecutive losing trades before the EA stops. Daily loss limit. Equity floor. These are the rules that keep a bug from becoming an expensive bug, and they are the ones most often left out.

6. Time and filter rules

Trading hours in which timezone (server time and your local time are usually different), days of the week, behaviour around news, maximum allowed spread, and what the EA should do with an open position when a blocked period starts.

7. What you want delivered

Source code or compiled only. One chart or multi-symbol. Input panel or hard-coded. A dashboard on the chart. Alerts. Logging to file.

The six ambiguities that cause most revisions

Phrase in the brief	What has to be decided
"when the candle closes above"	Which timeframe's candle, and does the EA act on the close itself or the open of the next bar?
"one trade at a time"	Per symbol, per direction, or per account?
"move stop to break-even"	At what distance, and does it include spread and commission?
"don't trade during news"	Which news, which impact level, how many minutes before and after, and what happens to a position already open?
"risk 1%"	Of balance or of equity, and measured when — at entry, or continuously?
"close everything at day end"	Server day or your day, and does it close pending orders too?

If you answer those six in advance, you have removed most of the revision rounds from your own project.

Formats that work

Send whatever you already have. All of these are fine:

• A written description in plain English or Hindi
• A Pine Script or an MQL file you own the rights to
• Annotated chart screenshots showing an entry and an exit
• A spreadsheet of the rules
• A voice note — genuinely, these work well for explaining intent

What does not work is a strategy you are still deciding. Software freezes the rules the moment it is written; if the rules are still moving, the build will chase them.

What you get back

A written quotation with fixed scope, a fixed price and a delivery date. Nothing starts until you approve it, and the scope document is what both sides refer back to if there is a disagreement later.

One thing we will not do, and you should be wary of anyone who does: we will not tell you whether your strategy is a good one. We build what you specify. Evaluating trading strategies is not our business and we make no statement about results.