// why it costs money
Free finance tools are good. That is not the question.
The free sites do quotes, charts, news and screeners well, and they will keep doing them well. The question is what happens to a tool once it knows what you own.
Everything is funded by something
A free finance product still has salaries, market-data licences and servers behind it. That money arrives from advertising, from data arrangements, from routing an order somewhere, or from a paid tier the free one exists to feed. None of that is a scandal - it is how the thing you are using stays switched on.
It does decide something, though. Whoever pays is the party the product is designed around, and every product eventually resolves its arguments in that party's favour. That is not cynicism about anyone in particular; it is what happens to any product left running long enough.
Monsa is funded by the person using it. There is one party, and they are the one reading the screen.
What that actually buys
No ads
Nothing on a page is there because somebody paid for it to be there. There is no slot to sell, so there is no reason to build a screen around one.
No free tier to harvest
A free tier has to pay for itself somehow, and a free tier attached to a portfolio pays for itself with the portfolio. Monsa does not have one. The first thing that happens is the payment.
Data is not sold
Your positions are not a product, are not packaged into a feed, and are not licensed onward. That is a commitment about what the business does, and it is in the privacy page rather than only here.
You are the customer
This is the whole argument, and the other three are consequences of it. When the person using the product is the person paying for it, the product only has one party to keep happy. When they are not, it has two, and they want different things.
What it does not buy
Paying does not make Monsa invisible, and we would rather write that here than have you discover it in a settings screen. The product sends pageviews to Google Analytics, and inside the product a page address contains the ticker you opened - so a third party can tell that someone signed in to Monsa looked at that company. Position sizes, prices paid and scores are not sent. It is still measurement, and it is still your watchlist.
So this is not a claim that nothing is counted. It is a claim about who the counting serves, and about what the business would have to become before your book turned into revenue. The privacy page spells out the whole of it, including the part we have not built yet.
It also does not buy a promise about markets. Monsa does not say these rules make money and it never says what to buy - it says whether what you hold still matches the rules you set.
The trade, stated plainly
You pay before you get anything. In exchange the product has no second customer, no slot to sell, and no reason to grow by learning more about you than the job needs.
If that trade is not worth it for how you invest, the free tools are genuinely good and a spreadsheet does more than people give it credit for. This page is not trying to talk you out of either.
One plan, priced up front, with the limits written down before you pay rather than discovered afterwards.