3Commas Legacy Plan Sunset: What Long-Time Users Should Know
3Commas announced a legacy plan migration on October 28, 2025, and if you're one of the users still sitting on a 3Commas legacy plan, the notice is really asking you to make a decision you haven't had to make in years: pick a plan, on purpose, with today's prices and today's feature list. Most people who signed up in 2019 or 2021 never had to think about that again. The grandfathered rate just kept renewing. That's over now. "My keys, my coins, my keys, my bot too" was the whole reason a lot of these accounts got opened on trade-only permissions in the first place. That logic hasn't moved. The price and the plan structure underneath it just did.
The framing in the announcement is gentle. New tiers, better tools, a smoother experience. The mechanics underneath are less gentle: every feature is behind another upgrade tier that didn't exist when you signed up, and the rate you've been paying isn't coming with you when you move. This is the same forced re-choose moment ProfitTrailer users lived through when that platform quietly stopped shipping updates, except 3Commas is being upfront about it instead of just going quiet.
I run the self-hosted argument for a living, so you should know that up front. TradeArmor is the bot I trade with every day: BTC/USDC signals with three years of live history behind them, fifteen real-time indicators, a plain-English AI strategy builder that runs on a key you provide, and DCA, grid, futures, copy trading, backtesting, paper trading, and tax exports built into one engine on hardware you control. That bias is on the table. It doesn't change what 3Commas actually announced, and it doesn't change what the new numbers actually cost.
What actually happens to your 3Commas legacy plan
The mechanics are straightforward once you separate the policy from the marketing copy. 3Commas is consolidating years of accumulated plan variations into three tiers, Starter, Pro, and Expert, plus the Asset Manager plan for traders managing client money. If you're on an older plan, you'll be invited to switch when the timing is right for you. Your current billing cycle isn't interrupted, and annual or prepaid terms run out on schedule rather than getting cut short.
The part that matters more than the announcement's tone: your 3Commas legacy plan doesn't vanish on a set date, it just stops moving forward while the product keeps shipping around it. No AI Assistant updates, no new automation, no roadmap items land on a frozen plan. You keep exactly what you have today, forever, which sounds like a deal until you notice "forever" here means "until the day 3Commas decides otherwise," a day the company has explicitly reserved the right to set later.
The new numbers, and what they replace
Here's where the announcement gets less abstract. The live pricing page today lists Starter at $20 a month, Pro at $50, and Expert at $140. The legacy pricing widely quoted by long-time users and third-party trackers sat around $14.50, $29.50, and $74.50 for the equivalent tiers. Run the math on the top end and a legacy Expert user migrating to the new Expert tier is looking at nearly double their old bill for what is, in the near term, a comparable feature set.
To be fair to 3Commas: the new tiers aren't identical to the old ones, and 3Commas has shipped real product since those legacy prices were set, including an AI Assistant and, more recently, an agentic strategy execution feature called QuantPilot. You are not paying more for nothing. You're paying more for a product that has genuinely grown, priced at what that growth now costs. That's a legitimate business decision. It's also not a decision you get a vote in.
"Stays active for now" is a plan, not a promise
A frozen plan without a fixed sunset date still behaves like a countdown timer. It just doesn't show you the clock. Every SaaS company that has ever deprecated a legacy tier followed roughly this script: announce the new structure, let the old one coast for a while, watch adoption numbers, then set the actual cutoff once migration has mostly happened on its own. The absence of a date today isn't a guarantee of stability. It's the setup phase.
That's not a knock on 3Commas specifically. It's how subscription software works everywhere, and it's worth sitting with, because it's the exact mechanism that put a lot of ProfitTrailer users in this same seat two years ago, minus the courtesy of an announcement. A vendor's roadmap is not your roadmap, and a price you locked in five years ago was never actually locked. It was rented.
The decision buried inside a routine migration notice
Read past the "we're improving our plans" framing and there are really only two choices on the table. Pick one of the three new 3Commas tiers and keep paying a SaaS company for automation that runs on infrastructure you don't control. Or use the fact that you're already being forced to re-evaluate to actually re-evaluate, instead of just clicking through to whichever new tier looks closest to your old one.
That second option is the one worth thirty minutes of honest thought, because the underlying complaint that got a lot of people onto 3Commas in the first place, wanting something that just runs without a subscription stack of TradingView plus a signal service plus a bot, doesn't disappear just because you pick Pro over Starter. It resets the clock on the same problem.
What doesn't change if you just pick a new tier
Whichever of the three tiers you land on, your exchange API keys still get stored on 3Commas' infrastructure. To be fair, the platform has never had withdrawal access and has invested real engineering in isolating that key storage, and none of that changes with this migration. What also doesn't change: a company server still holds something that can trade your account while you sleep, and the plan governing that arrangement is still 3Commas' to redefine whenever it wants. My keys, my coins, my keys, my bot too, is a fine standard to hold a vendor to. It's a lot easier to hold when there's no vendor holding the keys.
What changes if you stop re-choosing SaaS tiers
Self-hosting swaps a rented plan for owned software. TradeArmor runs on hardware you control, starting at $19.99 a month for the Starter tier, $49.99 for Pro, and $89.99 for Enterprise, each with a 30-day money-back guarantee and free updates for the life of the subscription. There's no legacy tier sitting quietly behind those numbers, because there's no vendor-side plan structure to age out of. The price you pick is the price, and the software keeps working exactly the way it did the day you set it up, because it's running on your machine instead of theirs.
I'll say the honest part plainly: TradeArmor's Starter tier at $19.99 isn't cheaper than 3Commas' new $20 Starter tier. That's basically a rounding error either direction. The comparison that actually matters isn't the sticker price on month one, it's what you're buying with it. A 3Commas subscription buys access to a roadmap the company controls. A TradeArmor subscription buys software that runs on hardware you control, at a price nobody but you decides to change.
If the migration notice is the reason you're rethinking your setup at all, the full 3Commas comparison walks through exchange coverage, feature parity, and where 3Commas still leads on breadth. If the security angle from the 2022 API key incident is part of your calculus too, is 3Commas safe covers that separately from the pricing question. And if you already lived through one platform's forced re-choose moment with ProfitTrailer, the parallels here to the best ProfitTrailer alternative breakdown are not subtle.
Frequently asked questions
What did 3Commas actually change with the legacy-plan update? On October 28, 2025, 3Commas announced it is retiring its old plan structure in favor of three new tiers, Starter, Pro, and Expert, alongside the existing Asset Manager plan for traders running client accounts. Anyone still on an older plan gets invited to move over, with advance notice and a described transition window rather than an immediate forced switch.
Is there a hard date when 3Commas legacy plans stop working? Not as of this writing. 3Commas says legacy plans stay active for now but will no longer receive updates or new features, and the company says it will announce a specific cutoff with plenty of notice once one exists. A plan that only gets frozen, not removed, is still functionally a countdown. It just doesn't have a date on it yet.
How much do the new 3Commas plans cost? The live pricing page lists Starter at $20 a month, Pro at $50, and Expert at $140, on top of the separate Asset Manager tier. That's meaningfully higher than the roughly $14.50, $29.50, and $74.50 legacy pricing many long-time users have been quoted, so moving off a grandfathered plan is very likely a price increase, not just a feature refresh.
Can I stay on my 3Commas legacy plan and skip the migration entirely? For now, yes, but with a catch. 3Commas is explicit that once you move to a new plan, you cannot go back. Every improvement the company ships from here forward lands on the new tiers only, so staying put means slowly falling behind on features while your bill stays the same, until whichever day the freeze turns into a shutdown.
Does switching to a new 3Commas tier fix the underlying problem? It fixes the immediate one, access to current features. It doesn't touch the structural one. Your exchange API keys still live on 3Commas' servers no matter which of the three tiers you pick, and the plan you choose today is still subject to whatever 3Commas decides to change tomorrow. You solved this exact problem once already by picking a plan. The legacy sunset is proof it can happen again.
Is there a way to stop being repriced by a vendor's plan changes altogether? Yes, by not depending on a vendor's plan structure in the first place. A self-hosted bot like TradeArmor is software you run on your own hardware for one fixed subscription price, with the full platform, signals, indicators, an AI-assisted strategy builder, DCA, grid, futures, copy trading, backtesting, paper trading, and tax exports, included on whichever tier you pick. There's no legacy tier to sunset because there's no vendor-side plan sitting between you and your bot.
Bottom line
Whatever you decide about your 3Commas legacy plan, decide it as a fresh choice, not a renewal you clicked through without reading. The migration notice is forcing that decision on you anyway. Take the thirty minutes it actually deserves.
TradeArmor exists for exactly this moment: three years of live signals, fifteen indicators, an AI strategy builder that runs on your own key, and DCA, grid, futures, copy trading, backtesting, paper trading, and tax exports, all running on hardware you own at a price that isn't up for a vendor's future reconsideration. See the plans and start the 30-day trial.
Past performance is not indicative of future results. Signals are algorithmic outputs, not personalized investment advice. Trading cryptocurrency carries substantial risk including the total loss of capital.
Ed Cava