The corporations - there is no requirement to trade or receive quotes. I would encourage you to have your wife start your car from this point forward - the futures exchanges don't play nice.
Finally had enough with those monkeys and stopped using them last year. It was a shame. Sierra Charts used to be really good back in the days. I stopped for a few months, got back to using them last year and everything changed. The software that used to be rock solid and reliable became total crap. All my programs that used to work flawlessly don't work at all anymore and I didn't change not one line of code. The support people were all noobs who know nothing about the software but still think they are God. You ask them something and majority of the time they give you a link and tell you to read their documentation not knowing you've already read the documentation 5 times or it's not in their documentation. And then when they finally give you an answer, you tell them it's not working and they mark your post as "User Discussion" and shut you out. Totally useless. Don't have time to waste with them. Good riddance! If you just want to trade, just use your broker software. If you don't like your broker software, change broker. Data fees though is from the exchanges, nothing to do with Sierra Charts. Some brokers choose to absorb them some choose to pass it onto traders. Some brokers choose to absorb some only for high-volume traders.
If you're using old studies they probably need to be recompiled to work with newer versions of SC. The majority of SC support posts are from their actual devs with actual technical knowledge. Which is very rare for retail trading software. the user base has grown alot recently so they are overwhelmed with requests. However if you challenge them with a technical question you will always get an answer. Please link to your specific forum post. I've been using SC for the last 5 years and can confirm that it's better than ever.
@JSOP what platform are you on nowadays? as a non-programmer, I find SC to be the best value. small learning curve to use their studies & alerts. I am of course interested in anything better
It also appears the tech support(engineering as the call it) is spreading a rumor of fictitious exchange creation. There is a confidence builder.
As much as data fees are probably overpriced. Last thing you want with futures is anything like the fragmented stock markets.
So they offered to do just that. Fragment liquid futures markets to bring down data fees and -their claim was total bullshit. There is a confidence builder. Fees may be too high, but bullshitting customers is not a solution.
Could possibly be they are naive? They just don't know what they don't know? however they are experienced it seems in integrating data supply across many different brokers and suppliers.