A previous note from the OpenBB Team

We know that this news might bring some initial concerns for many of you who have grown to rely on the OpenBB Terminal daily and may cause some inconvenience to your current workflows.

However, we want to assure you that we are committed to continuing our mission of democratizing financial research, which means the free, open-source platform is not going away. Instead, we are reimagining it to better serve our community's needs.

The open-source community has been essential to shaping OpenBB into what it is today, and we look forward to continuing to work with you.

If you don't want to go through the memory lane, skip to the "Why and What's Next" section.

History

When we started the Gamestonk Terminal in December 2021, we never expected this command line interface application to be installed over 150,000 times. But it did.

Gamestonk Terminal's evolution was extremely impressive — in a few months, it brought not only equity data but also forex, crypto, macroeconomic, index, fixed income, and even alternative datasets.

This is what the Terminal looked like when it went viral:

OpenBB Terminal 1.0

28th March 2022

One year later (9 months after raising a seed round), OpenBB came out of stealth mode.

So, we rebranded Gamestonk Terminal to OpenBB Terminal.

Around that time, we did a 45-minute demo of what the OpenBB Terminal could do, reaching over 36k views.

During that one year, a lot was added to the Terminal. Namely:

• Over 500 different commands
• A discounted cash flow command that would store the data in an Excel spreadsheet
• A prediction menu where users could configure the neural network hyper-parameters that they wanted to use on the data of their choice
• "Routines" — ways for users to create a pipeline of commands and even .openbb files to automate investment research
• A portfolio menu based on user requests

But there's more!

• We started a chatbot that allowed users to retrieve financial data on Discord - the OpenBB Bot
• We gave users the ability to export any dataset
• We integrated papermill to automate building an investment report through a Jupyter Notebook template
• We started working on our own API
• We added our first Streamlit dashboard to the new dashboard menu
• We announced our first installers, which were compatible with Mac and Windows and allowed less technical users to get started hassle-free

OpenBB Terminal 2.0

28th November 2022

Six months later, we announced OpenBB Terminal 2.0. In a nutshell, this involved:

• Announcing the new OpenBB SDK (Python package)
• Sharing how users leveraged the SDK in Streamlit, Voila, PowerBI, and even Next.js.
• Pushing to the extreme what was possible to do in terms of automating the investment research report generation through routines
• Allowing users to use the prediction menu on multiple datasets
• New Futures menu
• Powerful autocompletion
• API keys saved between installers
• Automated docker releases
• A new data sources menu that allowed users to check all the data sources behind each command and select the default
• Exported data, user settings, and a customization folder
• Easily customize the Terminal theme
• Support for internationalization
• Adding our branding colors to the Terminal

OpenBB Terminal 3.0

8th May 2023

Another six months had passed when we announced OpenBB Terminal 3.0, with the headline: "Nothing has changed, yet everything is different. A game-changing update empowering users with interactive charts and tables".

This update came with a live event — you can watch the recording here.

These were some of the updates:

• Charts became interactive, and users could draw, annotate, or add external data.
• Tables became interactive, and users could filter data.
• To bring interactivity to the terminal outputs, we built PyWry. This allowed the creation of HTML webviewers in Python utilizing the Wry library. We open-sourced the project, and you can read about that here: "Introducing PYWRY".
• We announced the OpenBB Hub, where users could sign up to manage all OpenBB products (Terminal installers, SDK, Bot, and even Terminal Pro for the first time). Today, there are over 37,500 investors in the Hub. You can sign up for free at my.openbb.co/app/hub. This announcement marked a crucial moment for us. We aggregated all OpenBB users into one platform where they could download our products, manage API keys, change settings, run script routines, and more.

OpenBB Terminal 3.x

For the remainder of 2023, we followed a two-sided strategy in the engineering team at OpenBB:

• Our platform team was busy replacing the SDK with the OpenBB Platform. We did that because the complexity of handling 500+ Python package dependencies was taking away a lot of resources and needed to be more sustainable. Now the Platform is more robust, scalable, and lean — you can learn more in our blog post "Goodbye OpenBB SDK. Hello OpenBB Platform".

• Our application team was busy developing our enterprise offering — Terminal Pro and Add-in for Excel.

Nonetheless, we kept innovating on the Terminal front:

• We introduced AskOBB (in partnership with LlamaIndex), which allowed using natural language to run commands on the Terminal.
• Routines became much more powerful. Users could now declare variables, slice them, or loop through a variable number of inputs, enabling greater flexibility and control over their workflow automation.
• We added an Oauth login between OpenBB Hub and OpenBB Terminal.
• We enabled users to overlay charts from different commands for more complex analysis.
• We introduced Community Routines so users could share scripts and even run them from the Hub directly.
• We created the OpenBB Network so users had their own usernames and profile pages to interact with each other.

Why and What’s Next

Why sunsetting the OpenBB Terminal

Over time, the OpenBB Terminal had, on average, 7k to 10k monthly active users — people from hedge funds, banks, academia, and retail who enjoyed having a command-line interface.

For these numbers, we concluded that considering this was a free and open-source terminal, the resources poured into maintenance, adding datasets, building an installer with 500+ Python package dependencies, and updating commands when vendors decided to update their endpoints… was not sustainable.

So, we had to make the hard decision to sunset the OpenBB Terminal.

What happens now?

The OpenBB Terminal will be reborn as the OpenBB Platform CLI.

The OpenBB Platform CLI will allow users to access financial data from the OpenBB Platform through a command-line interface, similar to the old Terminal.

Given our efforts in developing the OpenBB Platform (you can read more about what that entails here), this was the only sensible option.

The user experience should be somewhat similar, with a few differences:

• The Platform CLI will provide access to less out-of-the-box data (which OpenBB officially maintains). For more data, you will be able to pip install OpenBB extensions that get rendered by the Platform CLI.

• There will no longer be a "state". For example, "load AAPL" will no longer exist. The Platform CLI is a simple wrapper around the Platform. So, in the Platform-CLI, if you want to access AAPL historical data, you can do equity/price/historical --ticker AAPL, which is the equivalent of getting the same data in Python with equity.price.historical(ticker="AAPL”).

• Most toolkits will be deprecated, and we focus on data integration and standardization through our Platform.

• We will remove most bells and whistles, such as settings and feature flags. However, we will keep the mostly used ones, such as syncing your preferences and API keys for remote access.

• With the new charting extension, users can still enjoy all graphics/visualizations.

Who is the Platform CLI for?

We believe the Platform CLI will be an excellent tool for you if:

• You want to access financial data for free (through your own API keys);
• You are already leveraging the Platform today and want to quickly evaluate what data OpenBB provides access to;
• You are an open-source enthusiast who wishes to contribute to the most open investment research application.

What if you want a more mature financial terminal?

If you are a professional user who cares about customization and wishes to be at the forefront of generative AI for financial markets, the OpenBB Terminal Pro should be your go-to tool.

Conclusion

The OpenBB Platform CLI is currently under development, and we're excited to announce it soon; all details, including features and launch specifics, will be shared then.

Join our newsletter to stay tuned!

As part of our commitment to open and transparent communication, we are available to answer your questions, discuss any concerns, and hear your feedback on Discord.

We extend our deepest thanks to each and every one of you who has contributed to, supported and believed in the OpenBB Terminal.

As we move forward, your role in this community remains as crucial as ever. We invite you to continue with us on this open-source journey, lending your voice, your ideas, and your passion. Together, we can shape the future of investment research for everyone, everywhere.

FAQs

Why not monetize the OpenBB Terminal?

Since we don't own the rights associated with the data available through the OpenBB Terminal, we could never have monetized this application. When users get an API key from the data vendors, they must accept the ToS, which explains what they can and cannot do with the data. OpenBB acts as a middle layer.

Our goal has always been to allow users to do more with financial data and enable data vendors to reach a wider audience.

The Platform CLI will allow us to achieve that while reducing our pressure to maintain a Terminal that was taking a lot of resources.

What if I’ve been using the terminal for years and don’t want anything different?

You can access our last installer, which is available at my.openbb.co/app/terminal/download. Until data vendors make breaking changes, the Terminal should keep working as expected. However, the OpenBB Team will not release a new version that fixes this when that happens.

So, the solution is to fork the project (which has the most permissive license — MIT) and maintain it yourself. Since all the build workflows will still be available, you can start from there.

What are the guarantees that the Platform CLI will be maintained?

The OpenBB Platform powers the OpenBB Terminal Pro and Add-in for Excel. So, it's in our best interest to keep the Platform always up-to-date for the extensions we officially support.