Tools we actually use

Honest reviews, from actually running the thing.

No affiliate deals on any of these — the links below are plain links, not tracked ones. This is a short list on purpose: every tool here is something Tessen itself runs in production today, not a padded roundup of things we've merely heard of. If we haven't personally run it, it doesn't belong on this page.

DigitalOcean

Server hosting
digitalocean.com

What Tessen's own trading engine runs on, today, in production.

Tessen's engine — order execution, the risk agent, nightly forward-replay — runs on a DigitalOcean droplet, not a serverless platform. If you're running your own bot and need a machine that's always on with predictable latency to an exchange, this is the category to be in.

What's good
  • · Predictable flat-rate droplet pricing — no surprise bill from a traffic spike, unlike serverless.
  • · Picking the right region matters more than people expect: moving our engine to the sgp1 region cut round-trip latency to Asia-based exchange endpoints by roughly 11–72x versus where it ran before.
  • · Plain SSH + systemd — nothing exotic to learn if you already know Linux.
What to watch for
  • · You own 100% of the ops burden: patching, restarts, monitoring, backups. Nothing here is managed for you.
  • · No built-in alerting — we had to build our own watchdog process because a droplet failing silently is the default, not the exception.
  • · A busy restart can briefly exhaust your own database connection pool if you're not careful with pool sizing — that's on your code, not DigitalOcean, but it'll bite you the same way.

Vercel

Frontend hosting
vercel.com

What tessen.ai itself deploys to, multiple times a day.

The Tessen frontend — Studio, the public site, everything at tessen.ai — deploys here. If you're shipping a Next.js app and want git-push-to-live without managing servers, this is the default good choice.

What's good
  • · Deploys are fast and boring in the good way — a production deploy typically finishes in 1–2 minutes.
  • · Preview deployments per branch make it easy to sanity-check a change before it's live.
  • · Environment variable management is straightforward for the common case.
What to watch for
  • · Environment variables marked "sensitive" pull back as empty strings even for the account that set them — if you don't keep your own copy of a secret elsewhere, there's no way to read it back out once it's in Vercel.
  • · Serverless function cold-starts and connection-pool limits need real thought if your backend is a traditional database, not something Vercel-native.

TradingView

Charting & script distribution
tradingview.com

Where we publish real, working Pine Script indicators — not a Tessen product, but genuinely useful.

We publish open-source Pine scripts on TradingView under our own account (search "Tessen" or "ROTHFX") — an expectancy panel, an out-of-sample split tester, session-timing overlays. If you want to chart and prototype ideas visually before ever touching code, this is still the standard.

What's good
  • · Pine Script is genuinely fast for sketching an indicator or a rough strategy idea — far faster than standing up a full backtest environment for a first pass.
  • · The script-publishing audience is real distribution — people find and use scripts organically, no ad spend required.
  • · Free tier is enough to chart and test ideas; you don't need a paid plan to get real value.
What to watch for
  • · Pine's backtester is not the same engine as a real fee-aware, slippage-aware out-of-sample test — a strategy that looks great in TradingView's tester can still fail the harder version of the same test elsewhere. Treat it as a sketchpad, not a verdict.
  • · Script descriptions can't contain outbound links per TradingView's publishing rules — a real constraint if you're trying to point people anywhere else.
  • · Community review before a script goes live can take a few days and is genuinely picky about clean, documented code.

Looking for exchange setup instead? See connecting your exchange for the platforms Tessen actually trades on. This page will grow only as we adopt new tools ourselves — not on a schedule, and never for a fee.