Sunsetting OpenBB Terminal: Why, How, and What now?

UPDATE: We have released the new CLI, find all the details in our blog post "Introducing the OpenBB Platform CLI".

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.

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 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.

TL;DR: We are open-sourcing the entire OpenBB product suite under a permissive open source license

Today is bittersweet.

On December 20, 2020, over the Christmas holidays, I wrote the first lines of Gamestonk Terminal, what would eventually become OpenBB. My flight home to visit my parents had been cancelled because of COVID, so I stayed in London and started building a tool to streamline my own investment research process.

At the time, the idea was simple: individuals (and firms) should be able to own their research platforms. They shouldn't have to adapt their workflows to whatever a data or software vendor decided to build. They should own the entire experience - from the data they connect to, to the interface analysts and PMs use every day, to the APIs, models, skills, tools and AI agents that increasingly form part of the investment process.

Over the last almost six years, OpenBB evolved far beyond anything I imagined when writing those first lines of code. We started as an open-source terminal and went on to build the SDK (now Open Data Platform), the OpenBB Bot, the OpenBB Workspace, the OpenBB Copilot, the Excel Add-in, and an ecosystem of applications created by our team, our partners and the community.

We kept innovating and being at the forefront of what user experience should be. I was prepared to die on the hill that if we were to become the financial infrastructure software for the buy-side and sell-side, then we could not monetize data. Monetizing data would have made us a data vendor. The margins would have been higher, but the incentive would have shifted from offering a better UI/UX to selling more datasets. Selling an infrastructure platform is incredibly challenging, for many reasons. And so we died on that hill. Along the way, we built an incredible community, reached millions of people through our open-source project, worked with some of the largest financial institutions in the world and assembled a team that consistently built far beyond what should have been possible for a company of 10 people. There is a lot to be proud of.

But despite all of that, we couldn't find the product-market fit needed to build a sustainable business around this vision within the time we had.

As a founder, I've always bet the house on the next customer, the next feature or the next launch to change the trajectory of the company. Until even just last weeks, when we announced self-serve Workspace Lite. If we were ever going to close doors, then we never wanted to look back and think "what if".

In hindsight, we could obviously have made different decisions - e.g., surrounding data, or going more vertical with clients and their workflows. But short-term monetization was not something I was prioritizing over where I thought the industry was heading. Ultimately, I wanted us to stand for something.

In the last phase of the company, I explored many paths to give OpenBB a better home. We spoke with larger companies that shared parts of our vision and tried to find a home where the products, and ideally the team behind them, could continue to grow. Ultimately, we weren't able to make that happen.

I left London with my wife to build OpenBB and dedicated almost six years of my life to it. So did the team. We built at the intersection of finance, AI, open source and software infrastructure, often working on problems before they became obvious to the broader market.

Before MCP existed, we had created our own API protocol so agents could interact with the data and analytics widgets in the workspace. In 2023, we built askobb, which let anyone ask investment research questions in natural language that required joining multiple different datasets together.

What this team created deserves to continue existing.

More importantly, I still believe the original vision is inevitable. The future of financial software is not a single platform every firm is forced to use. It is thousands of firms building environments that reflect how they actually work - their own data, internal systems, investment processes, risk models and compliance requirements. Increasingly, their own APIs, MCP servers, models and AI agents too.

If that future is coming, then the technology we built shouldn't disappear simply because we weren't able to commercialize it successfully.

It should become available to everyone.

Today, with the support of the team and OSS Capital, we are committing to releasing the entire OpenBB product suite under a permissive license. This includes OpenBB Workspace, Open Data Platform, OpenBB Copilot and the OpenBB Excel Add-in.

These products represent over 5 years of engineering, millions of dollars invested in R&D and thousands of decisions, experiments and iterations with users. They will become a foundation that individuals, startups, data providers and financial institutions can freely use, modify and build on top of.

We will share more details about the order and timing of each release as we complete that work. In parallel, we will determine the right long-term structure to steward the projects, support contributors and preserve what made OpenBB special in the first place. Existing customers and users of the hosted products will hear from us directly about timelines.

For the partners who built applications for the OpenBB ecosystem, I hope this decision makes your products even more valuable. You already did the work of turning your datasets and analytics into applications that users can interact with. Now, those applications will be able to run inside infrastructure that firms can fully own, extend and customize, while combining them with data and tools from other providers across the ecosystem.

The same applies to the broader community. Developers will be able to use the entire OpenBB stack as a starting point rather than rebuilding the same infrastructure from scratch. Firms will be able to deploy it, adapt it to their requirements and connect it to the systems where their differentiated knowledge already lives.

Over the years, many talented people helped make OpenBB what it is today - employees, contributors, partners. Every one of them left a mark on the product.

But I want to recognize the people who carried OpenBB to the very end. Through the uncertainty and the final stretch, they kept building. They are engineers, product builders, designers and operators who have worked across financial data, AI, developer infrastructure and open source. In alphabetical order, they are:

Andrew Kenreich, Head of Product Engineering - LinkedIn
Darren Lee, Software Engineer - GitHub, LinkedIn
Ihsan Saracgil, CPO - LinkedIn
José Donato, Software Engineer - LinkedIn, X, GitHub, Website
Juan Alfonso, Software Engineer - GitHub, LinkedIn
Minh Hoang, Head of Product - LinkedIn, GitHub
Ogonna Nnamani, DevOps - LinkedIn, Medium
Rita Figueiredo, Head of Marketing - LinkedIn, Website
Rita Soares, Head of Design - LinkedIn, Website
Theodore Aptekarev, CTO - LinkedIn, GitHub

To our customers: thank you for trusting a small team with such an ambitious vision.

To our partners: thank you for building alongside us and helping create a more open financial data ecosystem. I hope the next chapter gives you even more freedom to serve your users.

To our investors: thank you for believing in us, including when OpenBB was little more than an idea being built from my living room in London. In particular, I want to thank OSS Capital and Joseph Jacks for supporting this decision and enabling the technology to live beyond the company. Two people I want to name separately: Justin Hoffman and Larry Augustin - working with both of you made me a better founder, but more importantly, a better person.

To every contributor who opened a pull request, reported a bug, wrote documentation, answered a question in Discord, built an integration or simply told someone else about OpenBB: thank you. OpenBB would not have been possible without you.

Finally, to every person who spent part of their career building OpenBB: thank you. We pushed the industry forward and proved that world-class financial infrastructure can be built in the open. The commercial outcome doesn't change the quality of the work.

OpenBB didn't become the company I imagined when I started this journey. But the mission was always larger than the company, and I still believe the ideas behind it are right.

If, ten years from now, firms around the world are using OpenBB as the foundation for software they truly own - connecting their own data, building their own workflows and deploying their own AI agents - then what we built will have achieved something that lasts far beyond us; which was my goal all along: have an impact.

Thank you for one hell of a ride.

Didier Lopes
(LinkedIn, X, GitHub)