Running your own bot: what you take on when you remove the operator

The cleanest answer to "who else can touch my assets" is nobody. Run open-source software on your own machine, hold your own exchange keys, and there is no third party in the chain at all. Freqtrade and Hummingbot both make this genuinely accessible, and for a certain kind of person it is obviously the right answer.

It is also the option whose costs are least visible in advance, because they are not features you compare — they are things that become your job.

We build Tradevo, a hosted service, so read accordingly. This page is about what self-hosting actually costs, and it concludes that plenty of people should do it anyway.

What this buys you, stated properly

No operator. Nobody holds a credential to your account except you. No service to trust, no company to outlive, no terms that change.

The code is inspectable. You can read exactly what the bot will do rather than accepting a description of it. For anyone who wants to know the rule and not just be told there is one, this is decisive and no hosted product can match it.

No constraints on strategy. Write anything. Nobody has to approve it, list it, or agree that it is a good idea.

These are real and they are not small. If they describe what you want, the rest of this page is a list of chores rather than an argument.

What becomes your job

Uptime. A strategy that is supposed to act at a particular moment and does not, because the machine slept, the process died, or the network dropped, has not behaved conservatively — it has behaved randomly. Self-hosting means you own the difference between "the bot is running" and "the bot is running correctly," and those diverge silently. The failure mode is not an error message; it is nothing happening.

Key handling. Your exchange API key now lives on a machine you administer, in a config file or an environment variable, backed up somewhere. That is not automatically worse than a service holding it — but a service that holds keys professionally has thought about rotation, access logs and blast radius, and a laptop generally has not.

Upgrades and breakage. Exchanges change APIs. Rate limits move. A bot that worked in March stops filling in September and the reason is three layers down. Someone has to notice, and if you are the operator, that someone is you.

Restart semantics. The genuinely hard one. When a self-hosted bot comes back after a crash, it has to work out what the world looks like now versus what it believed when it stopped — open orders it does not remember placing, a position that moved, an action it may or may not have completed. Getting this wrong is how people discover their bot acted twice. It is the single most underestimated part of running any executor, hosted or not.

What a hosted service is actually selling

Not strategy, and not convenience exactly. It is selling the operational layer: someone else owns uptime, key handling, upgrades and restart correctness, and is accountable when those fail.

Tradevo executes on Base from a wallet whose keys you hold, under a scoped signing authorisation — a delegated session signer governed by a policy we define — whose job is swapping allowlisted assets within your allocation. So the custody question and the operations question come apart: you keep the assets, we carry the operational burden, and what we do is bounded by our own executor — a narrower promise than an unbounded key, though a promise rather than something the chain enforces. Strategies come from a curated list with a published admission bar rather than being yours to write — which is precisely the trade a self-hoster would refuse.

When running your own bot is the better choice

You want to write the strategy. This is most of it. If the logic is the interesting part, no curated list is going to satisfy you and ours will not either.

You want to read the code. Freqtrade and Hummingbot are open source. You can audit exactly what executes. We publish a method and every on-chain execution, which is a weaker form of the same thing.

You enjoy operating things, or already do. If you run other services and have monitoring habits, the operational burden is marginal rather than new, and paying someone to carry it makes little sense.

You trade on venues we do not reach. We execute on Base. A self-hosted bot connects to whatever exchange you like.

You want no third party at all. The shortest possible chain is one you run yourself. That is not a preference we can argue with; it is the correct answer to a question we do not answer.

When a hosted executor fits better

You want automation without becoming an operator. Most people who want a strategy to run do not want a second job keeping it running, and the honest version of that is a service rather than a repository.

You want the assets out of a venue. Self-hosting removes the operator but keeps the exchange. The on-chain model does the opposite of what people assume: it targets the custody assumption, not the operator one.

You want restart correctness handled by someone who has thought about it. Not because it is impossible to do yourself, but because it is the part most likely to be wrong and least likely to announce itself.

Related: What a trading bot can do with your exchange API keys · Tradevo's method

Tradevo Technologies builds evidence infrastructure for systematic trading. Nothing on this page is investment advice, and no part of it describes how any strategy performed. Crypto assets are volatile and you can lose your entire allocation.