Either that or ask the broker (if you have enough weight) to give you an acct. You are getting paid (I presume) quite a bit for the project. You cannot afford $50 to stick into an account? It is not just the initial development. APIs change, things break, code needs to be maintained.
Yeah... yeah... I've turned down some contracts bc I didn't want to open an account with the client's broker. Maybe I need to change my thinking.
No, you do not. I have a paper account and not a regular account. The only thing I cannot do is flex queries
??? It says here that a a regular account is required for a paper account: https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/software/omnibrokers/topics/papertrader.htm
doesnt matter what it says. Sign up for an account and dont fund it. Then you get paper account. Simple
It's a pita to open an account, certainly not something that's reasonable to expect a dev to do unless they hold themselves out as an expert in that specific API. Good devs are in far greater demand than you think, which means you're wasting their time asking them to do non dev work and they can pick and choose clients and guess who they aren't going to pick? I am guessing we'll see a thread at some point asking why all devs seem to suck.
This is why I tend to focus on IB contracts. It's just too much to have many brokerage accounts scattered around for dev and test.