Every option on a stock, drawn as one 3D landscape: strike across, time back, price up. Drag it at sixty frames a second. Colour it by any Greek. Drop the stock twenty percent and watch fear change the shape. Then let the analyst tell you what you see, so what, and what the desk is thinking.
You have read that puts cost more than calls and that volatility has a term structure. Here you drag a slider and watch the skew steepen. You turn on the gamma walls and see why a stock pins on a Friday. Thirty lessons walk from a ten-minute tour to reading a real snapshot and testing a signal, and each step asks you to do the thing on the surface before it counts as done.
A chain is a spreadsheet. A surface is the whole book at once: where the dealers are short gamma, where parity breaks, which expiry carries the event, how yesterday deformed into today and why. Real chains are folded nine times a day with provenance per node, so you know which part of the picture is real quotes and which part is interpolation.
Delayed option quotes cost almost nothing; a vendor sells them for the price of lunch. What is scarce is a way to see a whole book at once, remember how it moved, learn what the shape means, and fold your own feed into the same lens. That is what the plans below price.
One object, every contract, sixty frames a second, in your browser. Nothing you drag waits for a server. Colour by any of six Greeks or a dozen research fields.
Two years of simulated days to drag through, real snapshots nine times a day, ghosts of any earlier state, trails of any contract, the crisis replay.
A curriculum that starts at the axes and ends at research, where every claim is a formula the repository tests, and every lesson is done on the surface, not read about.
A CSV, a broker key or a vendor feed becomes the same surface, with the same tools, with provenance per node. Computed in your browser; the server never has to see it.
The simulated market, the first two tiers of lessons and the whole engine cost nothing and never will. Paid plans add the rest of the curriculum, real market data, your own feeds and the research tools. Real-data plans open to a waitlist until the data licence is signed; nobody is charged for a surface we are not yet allowed to sell.
Prices in US dollars. Annual plans are two months free. Cancel any month; your lesson progress and saved views stay yours. A student e-mail address takes 40% off Learner and Trader.
| Feature | Observer · $0 | Learner · $15 | Trader · $49 | Desk · $199/seat |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The engine | ||||
| Simulated catalogue: 18 stocks, 2 years, 6 groups, drag any day | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Sandbox with the smile's four parameters and the price slider | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Contract spaces: weeklies, monthlies, LEAPS, pinned window; calls and puts | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Colour by Delta, Gamma, Theta, Vega, Vanna, Charm; the spine; 1σ and 2σ cones; click to track a contract | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Flash crash; custom shocks typed in the command bar | Flash crash | Flash crash, keyword commands | Keyword and Gemini-parsed commands | ✓ |
| Heights: price, dollar gamma, total variance, local volatility, combined (A op B) | Price, dollar gamma | All five | All five | All five |
| Layer 2: gamma walls, ghost surface, dealer pain, GEX, fractures, vanna and charm flow, the gamma range | On simulated stocks | On simulated stocks | On simulated and real | ✓ |
| Research: curvature and ridge, coastlines, density ribbons, variance terrain, local volatility, residual, skeleton, theta drains, deformation, fingerprints, volga, spread | Curvature, coastlines | All twelve | All twelve | All twelve |
| Compare two stocks in one space; surface algebra (difference, sum, mean, ratio, log-ratio, product) | Compare only | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| The crisis replay: six phases around a 20% fall, with the analyst narrating | ✓ simulated | ✓ simulated | Simulated and real, when one occurs | ✓ |
| Shareable state: any view or lesson step as a link | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ + team notebooks |
| Teaching | ||||
| Lessons with guided tasks and quizzes | Tiers 1–2: 11 lessons | All 30, and every new one | All | All + instructor view |
| The living curriculum: concepts, features, lesson plans, exercises, from first principles to research | Read it | Read it, track progress | ✓ | ✓ |
| The AI analyst: what you see, so what, what the desk thinks | 10 reads a day | 100 reads a day | Uncapped, fair use | Uncapped, fair use |
| Data | ||||
| Real surfaces from Cboe delayed chains (15 minutes behind), folded with provenance per node | — | End of day, 1 year back waitlist | Nine a day, 2 years back waitlist | Nine a day, all history |
| Collected universe (16 names today; 40 next; more as the store grows) | — | The collected names | The collected names + request 5 | Any universe you name |
| A real contract's trail through every snapshot, with the kept quote where there is one | — | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Earnings dates on the real timeline; the event pinch when it ships | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Your own CSV of quotes, read in your browser, volatilities implied when missing | 1 a day | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Bring your own feed: broker or vendor key, fetched by your browser | — | — | ✓ | ✓ incl. real time |
| Private stored feeds (your snapshots, your history, under your key) | — | — | 1 feed | Unlimited |
| The backtest lab: signals on every snapshot joined to the move after, noise always shown | — | Simulated | Simulated and real | Simulated, real, your feeds |
| The API: volatility tables, skeleton, fractures, fingerprints as JSON | — | — | — | ✓ |
| Account | ||||
| Seats, sign-on, billing | No account needed | 1 seat, card | 1 seat, card | Seats, SSO, invoice |
| Support | Community | E-mail, one business day | A named contact | |
Built and live today in the free engine: everything marked ✓ for Observer, the full lesson set, research colours, algebra, the replay, the command bar's keyword grammar, your own CSV, and the real-data collector. Real-data plans, accounts and billing open after the data licence; the founding Trader price is locked for as long as the subscription runs.
Nine times a trading day the collector reads Cboe's delayed option chains (every listed contract with bid, ask, implied volatility, open interest and volume, 15 minutes behind the market) and Yahoo's daily closes and earnings dates for sixteen names, and folds each chain into a volatility table over moneyness and expiry. Every node carries its provenance: how many quotes fed it, their spread, their open interest, whether it is thin. The page colours thin spots so you never mistake interpolation for a market.
Drop a CSV of option quotes on the page. The browser normalises it, implies any missing volatilities from prices, builds the table and draws the surface. Nothing is uploaded. Every tool works on it: Greeks, walls, fractures, local volatility, algebra against a simulated or real ghost.
With Trader, a broker or vendor key does the same with a live chain: your entitlement, your browser, our lens. We never hold the key or the quotes unless you ask us to store a feed.
A desk that wants history keeps it with us: snapshots under its own key, invisible to anyone else, read by the same endpoints and the same page. Any source folds in through one record shape, so a Bloomberg bridge, a vendor API and a spreadsheet are the same object to the mathematics.
Real-time is served only through a feed you are entitled to. Redistributing real-time options data carries exchange fees of about $1,500 a month plus a fee per user; we do not add that to anyone's bill who does not need it.
A number on the page is a formula's output or carries its source. Every label says where it came from: "simulated", "real: Cboe delayed quotes", "your file". A model shown beside real data says "(model)". A day with no snapshot is shown as a gap.
Every lesson is done, not read. A step sets the scene, says what you see, what it implies and what the desk makes of it, then asks you to do something on the surface before the next step opens. The curriculum is a living document; it grows with the tool.
Not as a subject, as a tool. Curvature tells you where a price bends fastest and so where gamma lives. Iso-delta lines are the coastlines traders quote skew on. Total variance must never fall as time grows, and where it does the surface has a crack. The deformation field between two days decomposes a move into the stock, volatility, time and the rest. Each appears in the lesson where it first explains something.
The tools a trader already pays for sell flow, levels or raw data. The courses sell video. Neither puts the whole book in your hands as one object you can shock and learn from. Prices below were read from the vendors' pages and recent comparisons in October 2026; check them before you rely on them.
| Product | What it sells | Price | What it does not do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Quant Surface Engine | The whole surface, drag it, shock it, colour it, learn on it; real chains with provenance; your own feed | $0 · $15 · $49 · $199/seat | Flow alerts, trade execution, signals sold as predictions |
| SpotGamma | Dealer-positioning levels, daily notes, intraday flow | $89 to $299 a month; institutional from $1,999 | A draggable surface; a curriculum; your own data |
| Unusual Whales | Options flow and dark-pool prints | About $50 a month and up | Surface geometry; teaching |
| OptionStrat | Strategy builder and P&L calculator | Free; about $30 to $60 a month; live flow to $100 | The whole book at once; the forces under it |
| FlashAlpha | GEX and exposure analytics by API | $63 to $1,499 a month | Visual learning; drag at 60 fps |
| Massive (Polygon.io) · ThetaData | Raw options data by API | $29 to $199 · $40 to $160 a month | Any picture at all; you build it |
| tastylive · Option Alpha | Free video education | Free | Doing it on a live surface; proofs behind every claim |