The short answer
As of October 5, 2026, the Unusual Whales pricing page lists four Dashboard & Tools plans for retail traders: Free at $0, Retail Basic at $50 per month, Retail Pro at $75 per month, and Retail Max at $120 per month. Billed annually, the same three paid plans work out to $42, $63 and $102 per month, charged up front as $504, $756 and $1,224 a year. The API is a separate purchase, starting at $150 per month for API Basic and $375 per month for API Advanced. The Whale Bundle, which combines the top dashboard tier with the API, runs $199 or $399 per month.
Every number in this guide was read from the vendor's own pricing page on that date. Prices on that page move: when we checked on September 7, 2026, a Labor Day promotion showed $34, $51 and $82 as the monthly equivalent on annual billing. Treat any figure here, including ours, as a dated snapshot and confirm it on the live page before paying.
The rest of this guide explains what actually changes between tiers, because the price list alone hides the most useful fact: all three paid dashboard plans get the same real-time options flow. The differences sit elsewhere.
The Free tier: the whole platform, two trading days late
The free plan is a delayed view of the full product rather than a feature-stripped one. Per the pricing page, free accounts see options flow two trading days late, news 15 minutes late, and alerts 30 minutes late, with the full dashboard, screeners and charts available on that delay plus access to the community Discord and chat. Saved contracts, saved filters and watchlists are marked as not included.
The two-day flow delay is the number that matters. Options flow is a same-session signal for most traders who use it, so a two-trading-day lag makes the free tier a way to learn the interface and judge the data layout, not a way to trade off the feed. The pricing page's own FAQ frames it the same way, recommending a free account as the way to try the platform before upgrading.
Retail Basic, $50 a month: real-time flow with limits
Retail Basic removes the delays. The plan card lists the real-time options flow feed, described as "Full Tape, 100% market coverage, with unusual activity indicators and custom alerts," with no delay on flow, news or alerts. It also includes a GEX heatmap for all US tickers, listed on the plan card without a delay, politician trade information, the stock and options screener, Market Tide and the other proprietary indicators, Greeks and volatility dashboards, an options profit calculator, institutional holder and insider trade data, and the AI assistant the site calls Mr. Whale.
Basic is defined as much by its caps as its features. It allows 25 custom alerts, 5 watchlists, 5 custom dashboards, and 10 saved contracts and filters per feed. Three items on the same card are marked with an X, meaning not included: the SPX market maker exposure feed, the daily options and dark pool data downloads, and Unusual Predictions, the company's prediction market product.
That first exclusion is easy to miss: on the card checked October 5, 2026, the SPX market maker feed starts at Pro, not Basic.
Retail Pro, $75 a month: the positioning feed and no caps
The $25 step from Basic to Pro buys four things, per the plan card:
- True SPX Market Maker Exposure with 10-minute Cboe updates. This is the feed the site brands as Periscope (the Max card calls the faster version "1 minute GEX Periscope"). The card names Cboe as the update source, which differs from gamma charts built only on daily open interest. If the term gamma exposure is new, our gamma exposure explainer covers what dealer positioning means and why it matters for hedging flows.
- Daily options and dark pool data downloads.
- Unusual Predictions access.
- No caps. Alerts, watchlists, custom dashboards and saved filters all become unlimited, and Mr. Whale usage is listed at twice the Retail Basic annual allowance.
Note what does not change: the options flow feed itself. A trader who only watches the flow and never hits 25 alerts or 5 watchlists gets the same tape on Basic as on Pro. The upgrade decision is really about the SPX positioning feed, the downloads, and whether the caps bind.
Retail Max, $120 a month: one-minute SPX updates
Max costs $45 a month more than Pro, and the card summarizes the difference in one line: "Everything in Retail Pro plus 1 minute GEX Periscope." The SPX market maker exposure feed updates every minute instead of every 10 minutes, and Mr. Whale usage rises to three times the Retail Basic annual allowance. Every other line on the Max card matches Pro.
So Max is a refresh-rate purchase. The positioning data is the same series; the question is whether a 10-minute snapshot is too coarse for how you use it. A trader positioning around SPX levels for the session may find 10 minutes plenty, while one trading zero-days-to-expiration index options intraday may care about the faster series. That is a judgment about your own process, and the page does not make it for you.
Monthly versus annual billing
Annual billing is a discount of about 15 to 16 percent across the three paid tiers. The page states the savings directly: $96 a year on Basic ($600 monthly versus $504 annual), $144 on Pro ($900 versus $756), and $216 on Max ($1,440 versus $1,224). The trade is commitment: you pay for twelve months up front.
The billing rules, all from the pricing page FAQ, are worth reading before choosing annual:
- Upgrades prorate immediately; downgrades take effect at the next renewal.
- Subscriptions auto-renew, and you can turn renewal off at any time.
- You can cancel from the account page and keep access through the end of the paid period.
- All sales are final. The one exception is a product swap: if you bought the wrong product, support can move you to another product on the same billing period if contacted within 7 days.
The last point is the one that catches people. "Cancel anytime" here means stopping future renewals, not a refund of the remaining months on an annual plan.
The API is a separate product
The API is sold on its own tab and does not include the website or mobile app; the FAQ says so plainly ("API plans are data-only"). Two retail API plans are listed for individual use:
- API Basic, $150 a month. Real-time options flow enriched with bid, ask, Greeks, open interest and volume, Nasdaq equities data, congressional and insider trades, dark pool data, daily open interest including FLEX transfers, a two-year historical lookback, 40,000 requests per day, and MCP support for AI tools. The card offers a 7-day free trial for new API subscribers. Marked as not included: WebSocket streaming, the 1-minute SPX market maker exposure feed, the premium endpoints (forex, commodities, economic indicators and others), and CME futures data.
- API Advanced, $375 a month. Everything in Basic with unlimited daily requests, plus the four items Basic excludes.
One detail worth knowing: the page's source on October 5, 2026 included an active pricing experiment labeled as weekly versus monthly-with-trial API billing. Different visitors may see different API terms, which is one more reason to read the live page rather than any summary.
The Whale Bundle: dashboard plus API
For anyone who wants both the website and programmatic access, the FAQ points to the Whale Bundle rather than two separate subscriptions:
- Bundle Basic: $199 a month, or $165 a month billed annually ($1,980 a year). Retail Max dashboard access including the 1-minute Periscope feed, Unusual Predictions, API access at 120,000 daily requests with a two-year lookback, MCP support, and $200 in Data Shop credits on annual billing. WebSockets, premium endpoints and CME futures are marked as not included.
- Bundle Pro: $399 a month, or $330 a month billed annually ($3,960 a year). Everything in Bundle Basic with API Advanced in place of API Basic: unlimited API requests, WebSockets, premium endpoints, and $500 in Data Shop credits.
The vendor states the bundles save $1,460 and $2,480 a year against buying the pieces separately, and describes the bundle as about 30 percent less than the standalone total. Note that Bundle Basic's 120,000 daily requests is three times the 40,000 on standalone API Basic, so the bundle is not simply the two products glued together.
Building a product for other people on this data falls outside all of the above. Retail and API plans are for individual use; commercial licensing sits on separate business plans (Startup, Kafka and Enterprise), which the page lists from $625 a month billed annually.
Where other pricing summaries go wrong
Two patterns showed up while researching this page. Third-party software directories carry figures that do not match the vendor: SoftwareSuggest's unclaimed profile lists $48 a month and $399 a year, neither of which appears on the live pricing page. And the vendor's own marketing pages are not fully consistent with its pricing page. The Unusual Whales pricing landing page says "higher tiers include additional features like API access," while the pricing page FAQ says API plans are separate and that the bundle is the way to get the website and the API together. When the two disagree, the pricing page, with its plan cards and FAQ, is the one to trust.
Which plan matches which use
Read as a decision tree, the page sorts cleanly:
- Learning the platform or reviewing past flow: Free covers it, on a two-trading-day delay.
- Watching live flow with modest alert and watchlist needs: Basic includes the same real-time feed as the higher tiers.
- Wanting the SPX market maker positioning feed, data downloads, or no caps: Pro is where those begin.
- Needing that SPX feed refreshed every minute rather than every 10: Max.
- Writing code against the data: the API, or the bundle if you also want the website.
If the price is the obstacle rather than the plan, our guide to free Unusual Whales alternatives maps each feature to a free substitute and says plainly where none exists, and our side-by-side comparison with Unusual Whales lists the categories where they lead. For paid flow tools beyond this one, see our options flow scanner comparison.
Educational content, not financial advice. See our risk disclosure.