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The second setup piece. What a QuantConnect account gives you, the minimum you actually need to pay for to work the way we do, and the two tools to install on your computer.
A free QuantConnect account lets you write and backtest strategies in their website. That is a fine place to look around, but it does not let you work from your own computer with your own AI, which is the whole point of this setup. For that you need three things.
First, a paid seat. QuantConnect's tiers change names and prices from time to time, so check their pricing page, but the tier you want is the lowest one that says local coding or CLI access. At the time of writing that is the Quant Researcher tier, and the seat itself is $10 a month. Second, a backtest node: a rented machine in their cloud that runs your backtests next to their data. A small one comes free with a new account; we pay for a faster one, their B2-8 model, at $14 a month. Third, the LEAN CLI, which is free.
When you are ready to trade, or to paper-trade against real-time markets, which is the last stage of the gauntlet, you add a live node. Each live node runs one deployment, so in practice one node per brokerage account. The smallest, the L-MICRO, is $24 a month and is what we run. So the whole setup, seat, backtest node and one live node, comes to $48 a month at the time of writing. Nothing here needs to be bought on day one; add nodes as the work reaches them.
The LEAN CLI is a small program you install on your computer with one command. You log in once with your QuantConnect credentials and it remembers you. From then on every interaction with QuantConnect is a typed command: create a project, push code to the cloud, run a backtest, fetch the result, deploy live. Your AI agent runs these commands for you, which is why this one small tool is the hinge of the whole setup. Ask your agent to install and log in; it will know how.
Docker is the second tool, and you only need it if you want to run backtests on your own machine rather than in the cloud. Docker runs the LEAN engine in a sealed box with everything it needs already inside, so it works identically on any computer. If you are happy to run every backtest in the cloud, skip Docker entirely and come back to it later. Everything the cloud commands do works without it.
One thing we deliberately leave for a later piece: market data. Cloud backtests use QuantConnect's data as part of the service, but downloading data to your own computer costs credits, and the choices there deserve their own explanation.