Been building automated Solana trading bots for individual clients, and the #1 thing I keep having to explain upfront: a real trading bot and a "signals" subscription are not the same product, even though they get marketed identically.

A signals group sends you alerts and you (or some black-box on their server) act on them. You're renting someone else's judgment every month, forever, and you have zero visibility into what it's actually doing.

A bot you commission is code. It runs on your machine, with your wallet, executing rules you defined — entry filters, exit logic, stop losses, position sizing. You can read it, test it, and turn it off. No recurring rent on someone else's opinion.

The technical bar that actually matters and rarely gets talked about:

• State has to survive a crash. If your bot dies mid-position and forgets it was holding, that's a real loss, not a bug report.

• Timed exits have to survive a restart. A stop-loss or take-profit that only exists in memory is not a stop-loss.

• You need to be able to test the logic without risking money. If the only way to validate your rules is live capital, you're debugging with your own funds.

• Full logging or you're flying blind. Every entry, exit, and error should be reconstructable after the fact.

None of this guarantees profit — it can't, and anyone implying otherwise about a bot (or a signals group) is selling you a story, not software. What it does guarantee is that the thing runs the rules you actually specified, consistently, and doesn't quietly die at 3am holding a position you don't know about.

If you're evaluating a bot builder, ask them these four questions before you ask about price.