Why use Anthid instead of rolling your own trading infrastructure

Every developer who builds a trading strategy hits the same fork in the road: wire up the broker yourself, or let someone else carry that weight. Building it yourself feels productive at first. The API docs look manageable, the first test order goes through, and it seems like you saved money. Then reality shows up.

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What rolling your own actually costs

A broker integration is never a weekend project. It is a permanent obligation. Orders get rejected for reasons the docs never mention. A websocket drops at 2am and your fill events quietly vanish. Positions drift out of sync with the broker and you lose a morning reconciling them by hand. Rate limits change without warning. Then you add a second broker and discover that everything you built is specific to the first one: different order formats, different error codes, different ideas about what a “filled” event even looks like. Here is the uncomfortable part. None of that work makes your strategy better. It keeps the lights on, and that is all it does. The hours you spend babysitting connections are hours you are not spending on the thing that actually makes money.

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What Anthid does instead

Anthid is managed trading infrastructure: one API for order execution, broker connectivity, live event streams, and risk controls. Your code talks to a single interface no matter which broker sits behind it. The model is simple. Instead of submitting raw orders and watching them like a hawk, you describe the outcome you want. An intent is expressed in Anthid’s own terms and translated into each broker’s dialect at routing time, so Anthid handles the retries, the failures, the reconciliation, and every broker’s quirks on your behalf. Alpaca and Lightspeed are connected today, both in beta, more are on the roadmap, and adding one is a config change rather than a rewrite. Every broker event arrives in a normalized stream and lands in a durable historical ledger, so when you ask “what actually happened to that order,” there is a real answer. Controls run before the order ever leaves the platform. Trading windows and maximum order size are enforced at submission, so an oversized order, or one sent outside approved hours, is stopped before it reaches the broker rather than discovered after the damage is done. Organization controls act as a kill switch across every connected account, which is the fastest way to stop trading during an incident.

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The numbers you would otherwise own

Anthid runs at 99.99% uptime with median order acknowledgement of 42ms. Those figures are easy to read and very hard to earn. If you build your own stack, you own them yourself, along with the monitoring, the failover, and the 3am pages when something slips. Most small teams never get close, and the gap shows up at the worst possible moment, which in trading means an open position you cannot see.

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When building your own still makes sense

To be fair, custom infrastructure has its place. If you are a large firm with a dedicated platform team, colocated servers, and latency requirements measured in microseconds, you probably should own the whole stack. For a solo developer, a small quant team, or a startup shipping its first strategies, the math points the other way. You are not really choosing between free and paid. You are choosing between paying with months of engineering time or paying for a service that already solved the problem.

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Try it before you commit

Anthid has a free tier with paper trading, no credit card and no sales call required. Paper accounts run against the same API surface as live, so you can point your strategy at the API, run it against paper money, and see how it feels in an afternoon. Connecting a live broker account moves you to a Starter or Professional plan, but nothing about your integration changes when it does. If the goal is to ship a live strategy this week instead of this quarter, that is the whole argument in one sentence.

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