Punch Trade.
For nearly a decade, Indian retail traders who wanted serious charts faced two practical options: pay a monthly subscription to TradingView, or settle for the often-clunky charts embedded inside their broker's app. That trade-off is starting to shift. As the country's active trader base has expanded - particularly in intraday and options - a new generation of discount brokers has have built charting platforms in-house, offered free of cost as part of the trading experience itself. The result is a quieter but consequential change in how Indian retail traders access professional-grade analysis tools.
TradingView remains the global default for chart-driven analysis, and several Indian platforms - including some of the largest discount brokers - integrate its charts via embed. The convenience comes with two real costs for active traders. Advanced charting features tend to sit behind paid subscription tiers that intraday and options traders end up paying for separately, on top of their brokerage. For a retail trader making rapid intraday decisions, the friction of toggling between an embedded chart view and the broker's native order ticket is more than cosmetic.
One company building in the opposite direction is Punch Trade, a deep discount broker. Punch has positioned its in-house charting engine as a free TradingView alternative for Indian traders - fully native to the trading app, with no third-party embed and no subscription tier - and the company describes its charts as rivaling TradingView in depth and responsiveness. The chart engine itself is built in-house by an engineering team with a long track record in Indian charting tools.
For Punch, "rivaling TradingView" is a brand-level claim about the kind of analysis the platform supports, not a checklist comparison. It refers to chart responsiveness, indicator and drawing-tool depth, and the kind of layout flexibility that traders have traditionally associated with paid charting platforms abroad. Because the engine is native rather than a third-party embed, the company also says traders can move from analysis to order placement without leaving the chart view - a workflow that, on embed-based platforms, often involves switching contexts.
Pricing is the other side of Punch's positioning. The platform charges a flat â¹1 brokerage on every executed order, applied uniformly to equity, futures and options trades, with no separate charting or platform subscription fee layered on top. Product priorities, in turn, are shaped through Builder's Lab - Punch's open community board for feature requests, where active users propose and rank ideas and the company credits shipped items back to the traders who first suggested or supported them.
Punch is not the only Indian broker rethinking how charting is delivered. A handful of newer platforms, including Sahi and 9:15 by groww, have moved in adjacent directions, each making different architectural choices around what is built natively and what is licensed or embedded. Taken together, the shift suggests that for an evolving cohort of Indian retail traders - scalpers,
options buyers, swing traders - the relevant question is no longer "which charting subscription do I need to pay for" but "how much is my broker bundling in by default". The answer increasingly depends on whether a broker views charting as a cost centre or as the primary channel where retail traders spend most of their time.
Punch's bet on charting depth comes with trade-offs the company itself acknowledges. The broker is currently offers equity, futures, options and ETFs on the cash and derivatives side, and does not yet offer commodity or currency trading, mutual fund investing, IPO applications, or API-based algorithmic trading. An iOS application is still in development, with the platform live on Android and as a full-featured desktop web app.
For now, the broader signal from companies like Punch is that the relationship between Indian brokers and charting tools is changing. As serious retail users push for tighter integration and lower running costs, the chart is increasingly something the broker is expected to build itself - not license, not embed, not subscribe to.
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