Spend a week shopping for gamma exposure tools and you will come away more confused than you started. One vendor charges nothing, another charges $48, another $299, another $720, and every single one of them uses the words "live," "real-time," and "edge" somewhere on the pricing page. The screenshots all look similar. The levels all have the same names. So what exactly does the $299 subscriber get that the free user does not, and is it worth 299 dollars?
The honest answer requires sorting the whole market by one question the vendors would rather you did not ask: what is the data underneath, actually? Do that, and the entire confusing market collapses into six rungs of a ladder. Every GEX product you will ever encounter sits on one of them. I run one of these products myself, so I will tell you plainly which rungs mine sits on, and I will be equally plain about everyone else's.
Every GEX product you will ever encounter sits on one of six rungs. The vendors won't tell you which one. The data will.
Two axes, not one
Before the ladder, the insight that organizes it. A gamma exposure map is built from two inputs, and they age at completely different speeds.
The first input is open interest: how many contracts are outstanding at each strike. This is the structural skeleton of the map. It is published exactly once a day after the close, verified by the OCC's overnight clearing. During the session it does not update. Anyone showing you "intraday OI" is showing an estimate (a topic this site covers in obsessive detail).
The second input is the Greeks side: gamma, delta, and the price and volatility inputs they are computed from. This side can be as stale as a delayed feed or as fresh as a live tick, and refreshing it is cheap and routine.
Most vendor marketing blurs these two axes into one word, "live." A dashboard can recompute gamma on live prices every second and still be drawing yesterday's positions. The ladder below keeps the axes separate, because that separation is where the real differences (and the real prices) live.
The six rungs
Yesterday's OI + delayed Greeks
What it is. The classic naive GEX map, and the cheapest way to see one: verified overnight OI, gamma recomputed on delayed price data. Cost: free at the low end, and a fair number of paid tools at every price point are quietly this. The honest caveat cuts both ways. This setup genuinely carries an edge: verified OI is noise-free, its only flaw is staleness, and staleness blurs a map gradually rather than breaking it. Our strike-touch study, run on exactly this class of data plus a model, measured the pinning effect at strong statistical significance. The misleading part at this rung is not the method. It is any tool sold as "live positioning" without saying which rung it sits on.
Yesterday's OI + live Greeks
What it is. Same frozen OI underneath, but gamma and delta recomputed continuously on live price and volatility. The map's values update smoothly through the session; its structure does not. Cost: this is where many paid subscriptions actually sit (whatever the landing page says). The price will not tell you: vendors do not disclose their rung, which is half the reason this ladder needs writing down. The honest caveat. Live recalculation sharpens the arithmetic, and that has real value around fast-moving sessions. But no amount of recomputation changes yesterday's positions. If a fund rolled its collar at 10:15, rung 2 finds out tomorrow morning, exactly like rung 1. Only a model can estimate intraday OI, which is what the next rung is for.
Modeled intraday OI + delayed data
What it is. The first rung where the OI axis itself moves during the session: a trained model estimates how positioning migrates through the day, on top of the verified overnight base. This is what the Free tier of this site runs (the model is documented here, error rates included, and the dashboard lets you flip between the Model view and the Naive view to see exactly what it changes). Cost: free, here; comparable modeling elsewhere is usually bundled into larger subscriptions. The honest caveat. It is an estimate and it should be labeled as one. Ours is. An unlabeled estimate is a rung-1 product wearing a rung-5 costume, and the industry has more of those than it should.
Modeled intraday OI + live data
What it is. The same modeling idea, upgraded on both axes: live market data feeding a live classification engine that checks each trade against the bid and ask at execution to infer opening versus closing intent (the Lee-Ready family of methods). And here is the property that defines this rung: classification works wherever there is a tape. Bundle the exchange feeds into one consolidated view and it covers every instrument on every venue (SPX, ES, SPY, single names), which is exactly what the marked data one rung up cannot do. This is what the Plus tier of this site is being built around, and it is the highest rung reachable without buying exchange positioning data, which is only complete for SPX in any case. Cost: typically a mid-tier subscription wherever it genuinely exists. The honest caveat. Classification output is a probability, never a count. A well-built rung-4 system narrows the gap to rung 5 considerably. Off-SPX it is flatly the better tool because rung 5 does not fully exist there. On SPX itself it cannot close the gap to zero, and anyone claiming otherwise is overselling.
Exchange-marked positioning data
What it is. Products built on Cboe's Open-Close data: aggregated summaries of the actual open/close markers carried on orders, sold end-of-day and at 10-minute or 1-minute intraday intervals. This is the feed underneath the well-known positioning dashboards, which retail for roughly $250 to $720 a month. Who it is for: serious SPX-focused traders for whom that subscription clears the bar. The honest caveat comes in two parts. First, the mechanics: markers are self-reported at order entry, delivery lags by minutes, and coverage is complete only for products that trade exclusively on Cboe (SPX yes; SPY and ES flow, mostly no). Second, the epistemics: better inputs are a weighted coin, not a crystal ball. Knowing the dealer book tilts probabilities; it does not forecast what hits the tape next. And in quantified terms, no vendor on this rung has ever published what their edge is actually worth. The full argument is here.
The raw institutional stack
What it is. The full OPRA feed, tick-level quote data, trade-by-trade execution records with markers and participant capacity, futures tick data for hedge detection, co-location. Cost: $10,000 to $50,000 a month before you have hired anyone to process it. Who it is for: large hedge funds and quantitative trading firms, where the intraday positioning estimate feeds directly into systematic models and the data budget has a team attached. Why retail should still know it exists. Two reasons. It is the price-check on everything below it (when a $30-a-month product implies rung-6 capabilities, you now know what those actually cost). And it is where any genuine "we reconstruct real-time flow" claim would have to live, infrastructure-wise, to be true.
Where the familiar names sit
Representative examples, with list prices as of mid-2026 (tiers and prices change; treat this as orientation, not a catalog):
| Product | Rung* | Representative price | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free GEX dashboards, most "gamma levels" bots | 1–2 | Free and up | Yesterday's OI; the Greeks freshness varies and is rarely disclosed, at any price |
| MenthorQ, Unusual Whales (GEX tools) | 1–3 (not fully disclosed) | $48–$129/mo | Both are broader platforms (live flow, dark pool prints, multiple models); this row concerns only their gamma levels component, whose OI source and freshness are not fully documented publicly |
| GEX Metrix Free | 3 | Free | Universal intraday OI model on delayed data, labeled as an estimate, documented error rates |
| GEX Metrix Plus | 4 | Rolling out | Live tape classification feeding the model; I will say plainly which parts are live as they ship |
| OptionsDepth, SpotGamma, VolSignals | 5 | $249–$299/mo | Built on Cboe Open-Close positioning data; strongest for SPX, structurally partial elsewhere |
| SqueezeMetrics | 5 | $700+/mo | Institutional-leaning tier: broad coverage, deep history, API |
| CheddarFlow, FlowAlgo, Trade Alert | Adjacent | $50–$150/mo | Live tape aggregators: they surface large prints as events, they do not reconstruct an OI surface. A different question, not a rung |
| In-house fund stacks | 6 | $10k–$50k/mo+ | OPRA, tick quotes, trade-by-trade records, co-location, a team |
*Rung placements reflect my reading of each product's public documentation and marketing as of mid-2026, not an audit of anyone's internals. Where disclosure is ambiguous, the placement is conservative and I will correct it on request. All product and company names are trademarks of their respective owners; no affiliation or endorsement is implied. Prices are rounded from public pricing pages and change. If you represent one of these products and something here is out of date or wrong, tell me and I will correct it.
Yes, my own products are in that table: rungs 3 and 4, priced accordingly. Leaving them out would have been false modesty; placing them higher would have been marketing. The point of the ladder is that everyone has to sit somewhere on it, me included.
Which rung you actually need
If you are a discretionary trader using gamma levels as context (futures traders especially): rungs 1 through 3 are genuinely enough, and I would start at 3 since it costs the same as 1. The structural levels that matter to you (Zero Gamma, the walls) are driven by institutional OI that turns over slowly. You gain more from learning to read the map (the chart-reading walkthrough) than from paying to refresh it faster.
If you trade SPX intraday, seriously and frequently: rungs 3 and 4 are your home base, and rung 5 is a legitimate consideration if $300 a month clears your personal cost-benefit bar. Be clear-eyed about what you are buying: better inputs on one instrument, minutes of lag, and an edge that has never been published in quantified terms by anyone selling it. Try the free rung first and measure what the upgrade would actually change for your trading.
If you trade many instruments: rung 5's structural SPX-only completeness matters less than coverage breadth. A universal model (rung 3–4) that works across hundreds of tickers beats marked data that only exists for one.
If you are building something systematic: you already know you are headed for rungs 5 and 6. The only orientation you need from me is in the intraday OI piece, which maps the datasets, the classification methods, and the costs in full.
The edge question, answered honestly
The uncomfortable truth that makes this whole ladder useful: every rung above zero carries some edge, and nobody has measured the differences between them properly.
The bottom rungs are proven in at least one direction: our strike-touch study measured a robust, statistically significant pinning effect using modeled OI on standard data. The top rungs have better inputs by construction, and the vendors there market the difference hard. But dealer positions are a weighted coin, not a crystal ball. What hits the tape next (at what volume, in what volatility) is beyond every rung of this ladder equally. And the head-to-head study (marked positioning data versus a good model, on real SPX dealer positions, with published methodology) does not exist. The vendors who hold the data have not run it, or have not shown it. Until someone does, the honest statement is: the edge differences between rungs 3, 4, and 5 are conviction, not measurement. Anyone charging you $300 a month on the strength of conviction should at least say so.
That is the orientation. Whatever you end up paying, at least you will know what rung you are standing on.
Start at Rung 3, For Free
The universal intraday OI model on live SPX data, with the Model view and Naive view one click apart so you can see the difference yourself.
Open the Free Dashboard Go Deeper: The Intraday OI Problem