Why I Built My Own Options Flow Tool Instead of Paying for FlowAlgo

The $50/Month Problem

I work in mining engineering. I'm not a Wall Street quant or a full-time trader. I sell options — mostly cash-secured puts and covered calls — as a side income strategy. It's systematic, it's boring, and when done right, it works.

But every premium-selling strategy starts with the same question: which stocks should I be selling on right now? You need to know which names have elevated IV, which ones are getting institutional attention, and which ones are at good entry points.

So I subscribed to the flow tools. Unusual Whales. Cheddar Flow. FlowAlgo. I've tried most of them. They all cost $30-50 a month. And they all had the same problem: they showed me thousands of trades per day with no way to tell which ones actually mattered.

I'd stare at a flow feed showing 200 trades in the last hour, most of them market maker hedging or multi-leg spreads that looked directional but weren't. The tools were great at showing data. They were terrible at helping me make decisions.

The Spreadsheet Phase

Like any engineer, I started building spreadsheets. I'd manually screen for high-IV stocks, check IV rank, look at the option chain, calculate potential returns, and decide which puts to sell. Then I'd log everything in another spreadsheet to track P&L.

This worked for about three weeks before I realized I was spending more time on spreadsheets than on actual analysis. The screening alone took 30-40 minutes a day. Then I needed another 20 minutes to check whale flow on the candidates. Then more time to calculate the actual trades.

Meanwhile, I'm paying for flow tools that don't integrate with any of this. Three subscriptions, three logins, three separate windows. And I still had to manually figure out whether a whale trade was actually bullish or just a hedge.

So I Built the Thing I Actually Wanted

The idea was simple: one tool that does everything I was doing across five tabs and three spreadsheets. Scan for high-IV stocks. Score them for premium-selling potential. Check what institutions are doing on those names. Generate a specific trade recommendation with the math already done. Track everything in one place.

The first version was ugly. A Next.js app with a bunch of API calls, a Supabase database, and some scoring logic I wrote on a Saturday morning. But it worked. Instead of 45 minutes of screening, I could see the top 25 put-selling setups in 10 seconds, sorted by a composite score that weighted IV rank, entry timing, and premium richness.

Then I added whale flow scoring. Not just "show me all the trades," but "score each trade 1-10 for conviction and only show me the ones that matter." I built 20+ signals into the scoring: trade size relative to open interest, sweep detection, bid/ask positioning, repeat activity, and more. Suddenly the noise became signal.

The Wheel Tracker Changed Everything

The feature that really surprised me was the wheel strategy tracker. When you sell puts, sometimes you get assigned shares. Most traders panic. But if you planned for it, assignment is just Phase 2 of the wheel — now you sell covered calls against those shares.

The problem is tracking your real cost basis across multiple rolls and call sales. I was doing this in a spreadsheet with formulas that broke every time I added a new column. So I built a trade blotter that tracks it automatically — every put sold, every assignment, every covered call, every roll. One number: your true cost basis.

Then I added AI analysis. Click one button and it looks at your position, fetches the current option chain, and tells you exactly which covered call to sell — the strike, the expiration, the premium, and what happens if you get called away. It even tells you when not to sell a call because the stock is about to report earnings or the flow has turned bearish.

Why Share It

I built Flow Proof for myself. I was going to just use it personally and keep paying for the other tools as a data source. But after a few months of using it, I realized two things:

First, the tool was working. My screening was faster, my trade selection was better, and the paper trading validation was catching bad signals before they cost me money. I had months of tracked results showing which scoring signals actually predicted profitable trades.

Second, every options trading community I visited — Reddit, Discord, Twitter — was full of people asking the same questions I had: "Which stocks should I sell puts on this week?" "Is this whale trade bullish or just a hedge?" "My put got assigned, now what?" They were all doing the same manual work I had automated.

So I cleaned up the UI, added a pricing tier, and launched it. Flow Proof isn't trying to be Unusual Whales or replace your brokerage. It's the tool I wanted when I was a premium seller staring at spreadsheets — one place to scan, score, analyze, and track, with AI that does the math for you.

What Makes It Different

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