With just a few days left: Premium pricing and timelines, in plain words

In the last three posts I showed you what Premium Research is: BackRoll, the Markets Hub and the Premium Guides.

With just a few days left before the close of presale, I want to answer the questions I get most often: what does it cost, when does access begin, and what happens if you change your mind?

Banker on Wheels is a family-run business, not a software company with a sales team. We’re a small team building apps, working with institutional-grade data providers and producing unique, high-quality research that we want to stand behind for years to come. That’s why we’ve structured Premium the way we have.

We’ve built this website on the trust of our readers over almost seven years. We don’t take that lightly, and we’re grateful for your support.

So here’s exactly how Premium is priced, why the prices will change, and what you can expect when you join.

The timeline

The presale opened on 30 September and closes on 15 November. That is the last day at €329 / €819 / €2,499.

Access opens for everyone on 16 November. Not when you pay: on the same day, for the whole group. Your Annual or Three-year term starts that day too. If you paid on 1 October, your Annual plan still runs to 15 November 2027; you do not lose the weeks in between. The presale locks your price, it does not switch access on early.

Why one go-live day? Because onboarding a group is an all-hands job for us: accounts, first questions etc. 

From 16 November the door is shut until the second intake in Q1 2027, at higher prices. These new prices also serve as reference for any upgrade.

Three plans, one price logic

Annual is the reference: €329 a year. Three years is €819, about €273 a year: you pay for roughly two and a half years and get three, the third year at half price. Lifetime is €2,499, once.

Why longer is cheaper per year. Commitment. A three-year member lets us plan three years of data contracts and research time, and we pass part of that certainty back. 

Lifetime, honestly. At the presale rate, Lifetime is 7.6 years of Annual. It also includes the Portfolio & Wealth Tracker, which will be sold separately at an indicative €990 when it ships in 2027/28; count that and Lifetime is just over four and a half years (that’s btw how we will amortise it internally for revenue regonition, everything above 4.5 years we assume is free). Lifetime means the life of the service. We have run Banker on Wheels for almost seven years and intend to be here for decade(s), but I would rather you choose it with open eyes than because of a number. 

How does VAT work? All three are net prices. Your country’s VAT (only for EU and the UK) is added at checkout. Stripe determines it based on your location. If you are a VAT-registered business, please write to us before paying. Qualifying business purchases may be eligible for the reverse-charge mechanism.

Why the list price only goes up, and why yours doesn’t

These are presale prices, the lowest this service will ever be. The second intake in Q1 2027 opens at €379 / €949 / €2,799, and later windows are likely to move up again as guides, tools and data are added to the pack. 

The lock – only guaranteed today. Whatever you pay now stays your price for as long as you remain subscribed. Annual at €329 renews at €329, Three years at €819 renews at €819. The one exception is very high inflation: if cumulative inflation between your purchase and a renewal passes 20%, we adjust to average Europe/UK inflation, not more. This is to offset our rising fixes costs like data and infrastructure. The increase is capped to inflation. We aim to keep the lock  rule, but we reserve the right not to offer it to future intakes, so the first intakes today may be the only ones with this guarantee.

Why no discounts, ever. Because we value your trust. First because we aim to deliver to the highest standards, and our work can’t be discounted including the fact that we pay tens of thousands for high quality financial data. A discount would also be unfair to the reader who paid full price the month before. We would rather reward trust with time: the earlier you join, the less you pay, and that advantage grows at every intake that follows. If you cancel and come back later, the price of that day applies. The lock is for members who stay.

Why the door opens only a few times a year

This is the part that surprises people used to software subscriptions. Rollers intakes are periodic. Banker on Wheels is family-run. I write every guide, QC the apps with a handful of geeky users, and answer the emails. When a group joins, the first weeks are onboarding, and that time comes straight out of writing the next guide.

So we batch it. A short window to join, then a long stretch in production mode: writing guides, building tools, refreshing data. From time to time we take a break to onboard a new group. It is the only way a team this small keeps quality where you expect it.

How often? We have not fixed it. At the beginning, a couple of times a year, perhaps. The goal is the highest-quality individual-investor community in Europe, not the biggest one.

What €329 a year actually pays for

The money goes to four places. Data licences first: five providers, including Finaeon (Global Financial Data), centuries of institutional-grade history that, to my knowledge, was never available to individual investors, in Europe or the US. With running costs, that is multiple times the price of a Tour de France bike a year. Then the apps: BackRoll, the Markets Hub and the Library + Toolbox, their hosting, daily data pipelines and new features. 

We will also add new currencies, data, and series in the coming months.

Then research time, the real constraint: ten guides live, around twelve more over the next 12 to 18 months, at the minimum. We hope to ship more. And independence: no ads, no sponsors, no pseudo-indepedent guide no outside capital, so when a product is not in your interest we can say so.

Changing your mind: four doors, in order

There is no trial. This is typical for online content. Unfortuntaly for us, a trial of guides is just reading the guides; the free site, nearly seven years of it, is the trial. What we offer instead are four doors:

1. Before 16 November: withdraw. Within 14 days of buying, before access opens, you get a full refund. That is your statutory right, and nothing has been delivered yet.
2. 16 to 22 November: downgrade. If you chose Lifetime or Three years and it feels too big once you are inside, move to a shorter plan within 7 days and we refund the difference (Lifetime to Annual €2,170, Lifetime to Three years €1,680, Three years to Annual €490), minus Stripe’s non-refundable fee of 1.5% to 5%, VAT adjusted. One move, final, until midnight CET on 22 November. Your price lock stays.
3. Any time: upgrade. Move to a longer plan and pay its next intake price of the day minus everything you have already paid. During the presale it is the current price – that is €490 from Annual to Three years, €2,170 from Annual to Lifetime, €1,680 from Three years to Lifetime. From 16 November the next intake’s prices apply (€620, €2,470 and €1,980). While upgrade exists, the cheapest route is the longer plan now, not an upgrade.
4. Any time: stop the renewal. One button under Account, Subscription. Access runs to the end of the term you paid for, then simply stops. No questions, no penalties. If after your first year the research has not earned its place in your process, do not renew.

What we do not do: full refunds once access opens on 16 November. The guides are digital and can be read in a few days. 

Who should join now, and who should wait

Join now if you have followed the free site for a while, and you know you will use at least some of the guides (live and in the pipeline), BackRoll or the Markets Hub. The presale is the cheapest this will ever be, and the lock makes the decision once.

Wait if your portfolio is still small (on €20,000 to €30,000 a flat fee is a big share, and the free content covers most of what you need at that stage), or if you are not sure you would open it. The second intake in Q1 2027 is a fine door too, at €379. There is simply no back door to €329 after 15 November.

Every rule above is written out in full in the FAQ on the Premium Research page.

PREMIUM GUIDES BY BANKER ON WHEELS. THE CORE OF PREMIUM.

In my last two posts I showed you the apps: BackRoll, the backtest, and the Markets Hub, the monitor. Today it is the core of Premium: the Premium Guides, and the pipeline of guides coming over the next 12 to 18 months.

Why guides at the core? The apps help you test your plan and monitor markets. The guides are where your questions turn into answers. Since we started coaching, hundreds of 1-on-1 sessions have taught us a lot about the problems you face, and the same questions keep coming back: how much can I safely withdraw, how do I set up portfolios for different goals, what do I do after a business sale or an inheritance, what changes if I move countries.

The guides are all written by me, with a portfolio construction focus, in a language you can understand. Ten are live today, around twelve more are in the pipeline.

Here is the 7-minute tour.

What the video shows, minute by minute

fourteen chapters

0:14 Independent research since 2020. Some of you have followed us for six and a half years now. In 2023 we started coaching, and coaching taught us a lot about the problems you face. After hundreds of sessions we are well equipped to solve your challenges, and institutional press now often refers to our guides, which I couldn’t have imagined when I started this small blog in 2020.

0:49 What Premium members are looking for. Most chats with investors, formal or less formal, coaching sessions or readers I meet when travelling, come back to the same core desires: freedom, work flexibility, health, time with your loved ones, some social or philanthropic impact, or the mobility to move to other countries. Behind them sits complete or partial financial independence, and each brings specific questions that our guides and tools are designed to answer.

1:46 The questions we answer. Specific questions come with real implementation challenges. The guides and tools address the safe way of withdrawing a small portion of your portfolio every year, so growth compensates the withdrawals and you don’t run a big risk of running out of money. They also cover inheritance, a business sale, liquidity, guidance on the asset allocation that suits you, and concrete ways of dealing with portfolio setup challenges.

The questions slide: four groups of questions on the left, how Premium helps on the right – the guides, our apps to test things for yourself, and the future Portfolio Tracker.

3:00 Non-US Guides you won’t find anywhere else. Each guide has a very specific portfolio construction focus, or answers a specific question or challenge investors have. Non-US specific research you won’t find anywhere else, written in a language you can understand, designed to save you time, fees and costly mistakes.

3:12 10 guides live today. The guides are grouped into sections: short-term investing, medium and long-term investing, fixed income, alternatives, and ETFs & tax / fee optimisation. Ten are already there, from where to park your cash and how safe money market ETFs are, to the equity allocation framework, bond ETF ladders, small-cap value and trading ETFs in size.

Already live today: ten guides in five sections, including the Banker on Wheels Asset Allocation Tool.

3:26 In the pipeline: Over the next 12 to 18 months we will roll out additional guides. For medium and long-term investing section: how to live off a portfolio, safe withdrawal rates based on our BackRoll backtesting tool, derisking before retirement, the next crash and how to prepare via ETFs, and leveraged portfolios – portable alpha ETFs for the more advanced investors among you. Other sections will also get additional guides as explained in the video. The pipeline is an indicative of the direction of travel that we may expand.

In the pipeline for medium and long-term investing: six guides, from how to live off a portfolio and safe withdrawal rates for European and UK investors to portable alpha ETFs.

4:05 Fixed income and alternatives. A fixed income corner with deep dives into specific ETFs and topics like credit or catastrophy bonds in the future. And a big focus on alternatives, because they can help you withstand a poor decade. The first guide coming in the next months is about choosing between gold, commodities, managed futures, tail-risk hedging, illiquids or Bitcoin, followed by a guide on managed futures replication strategies.

4:45 ETFs, tax and international aspects. We are quite an international website, so tax specific to one country is not the priority – it may come later. Generic tax optimisation topics like tax lot optimisation will be part of the guides, and so will topics like the international brokerage and private bank landscape.

5:04 Your Premium Dashboard. Every guide lands in your Premium Dashboard, sorted by section: ten guides live today, around twelve more in the next 12 to 18 months. These are the core building blocks of where we are going, and other guides, resources and potentially tools will come along.

Every guide lands in your Premium Dashboard: 10 live today and 12 in the pipeline across six sections.

5:26 How the tools fit together. The guides are just the beginning of the whole suite. Around them sit the apps: BackRoll, our backtesting tool, the Markets Hub, and the Library + Toolbox.

5:44 Coming next: Portfolio & Wealth Tracker. We are also building a Portfolio & Wealth Tracker, expected in 2027/28. It is a privacy-first tool: you don’t upload your broker statements or give your credentials to any website, you manage it on your PC. It is connected to the Markets Hub, which feeds it today’s market assumptions like yields and valuations, and it projects your net worth, your cash flows and your specific goals. That’s how we want all these building blocks to work together.

How the two interact: the Markets Hub feeds current market data and assumptions to the Tracker, which projects your cash flows and net worth.

In short: the Markets Hub supplies the assumptions – today’s yields, valuations and long-term return estimates – and the Tracker holds your own numbers, on your PC. Together they project your cash flows, your net worth and your specific goals. The Tracker will be a separate add-on, included with the Lifetime plan.

6:43 Watch next. If you like what we are building, check out the other demos: BackRoll, our backtesting tool, and the Markets Hub. Years of work went into this, and I’m really looking forward to seeing you on board.

More on Premium: the BackRoll demo (the backtest), the Markets Hub demo (the monitor), and my launch letter on why we are launching Premium Research.

BANKER ON WHEELS NOMINATED AT THE ETF STREAM AWARDS 2026

I’m delighted to share that Banker on Wheels has been shortlisted for ETF Educational Content of the Year at the ETF Stream Awards 2026, the reference awards of the European ETF industry. We’re sharing the category shortlist with names such as J.P. Morgan Asset Management.

For an independent publication launched in 2020, this is a proud moment. More importantly, the nomination recognises our investigation into why European investors can face unnecessary barriers when trying to access ETFs that should be available to them.

As ETF Stream put it, “this recognition reflects your outstanding contribution to the ETF ecosystem and your continued commitment to excellence in our industry. You are now one step closer to taking home one of Europe’s most prestigious ETF honours.”

The nomination relates to our investigation into PRIIPs KID language barriers.

The five nominees in our category are:

• Guide to ETFs – J.P. Morgan Asset Management
• ETF Training Hub by Blackwater
• Banker on Wheels (Europeans Locked Out Of ETFs Investigation)
• ETFGI LLP
• BNY ETF Corner

Two judging panels of 30 external experts from the European ETF industry and the buy side, from BlackRock, State Street and S&P Dow Jones Indices to Morningstar, or BNP Paribas Wealth Management, evaluate the submissions. The full shortlist is on ETF Stream.

What happens next

winners announced on 3 December

The vote. Two judging panels comprising 30 external experts from the European ETF industry and the buy side will evaluate the submissions. 

The night. The winners are announced on 3 December 2026 at The Royal Lancaster in London.

Thank you

This investigation exists because one Banker on Wheels coaching client could not buy the most popular ETF in Europe, and because readers kept asking why. If you shared or quoted it, this nomination is yours too.

The nomination does what the piece set out to do. It puts the KID language wall in front of the people who can remove it: regulators, issuers and brokers. We hope it helps move things forward for European investors.

If you haven’t read the investigation yet, now is a good time. If you found it useful, share it with someone who has faced the same barriers. Subscribe to follow the story and our latest research.

Why We Are Launching Premium Research After nearly Seven Years Of Free Financial Education

Dear Wheelers –

I have always believed in open, freely available education.

Banker on Wheels was built for impact. As some of the oldest readers know, it began as a way of paying back the life-changing experiences and the generosity I received from people during my round-the-world cycling adventures. Making a business out of it was not part of the plan for the first few years, because it risked narrowing the wide impact, which is what fuels me in the first place.

What kept the project alive was the mission: making a small bike the symbol of resources investors can trust, in an industry where intellectual honesty is rare. Like in investing, there are no shortcuts to blogging. So far, this has been a marathon, and it took a certain madness to keep dedicating the time against all odds.

We lead a fairly alternative lifestyle, so the opportunity cost so far has been our time and our retirement savings. I was always willing to make that trade, because it gives me real satisfaction that, in a very miniature way, we make the world a better place.

But the landscape has changed enormously since ChatGPT first arrived. Information is abundant, but genuinely independent research, real-world experience and human judgement are rare.

So we faced two choices: reduce our time, or make Banker on Wheels even better.

After thousands of hours spent building a free resource, we realised that creating a premium service was the only way to bring our research, guides and tools to the next level while preserving what makes Banker on Wheels special in the first place. That’s also what the majority of you wanted us to focus on in our last survey.

This premium setup allows us to partner with multiple data providers. Together, data and running costs amount to multiple times the price of a Tour de France bike. Some of these sources, to my knowledge, have never been available to individual investors, in Europe nor even in the US.

Centuries of academic-quality data, a non-US focus, our own quality checks and methodologies, and years of research and synthetic index construction make our apps genuinely different. We are building on deep data and rigorous research foundations.

Supplemented with guides you won’t find anywhere else, Premium Research will allow us to build one of the most complete research platforms available to non-US investors.

The upside of those nearly seven years of Banker on Wheels for you, is that we now understand our readers’ problems well enough to build a service we’re certain returns considerably more value than it costs.

Premium is how we fund the 90% of the site that is our core mission and will stay free. It’s how we maintain full independence, so there is no interference from third parties including ETF managers.

Instead of publishing pseudo-independent sponsored content which you see so often online, we get phone calls from brokers or asset managers’ executives, because we are different and criticise some of their products freely. We tell them when a product is not in our readers’ interest.

Because we can.

I would never want Banker on Wheels to become a media site chasing traffic, advertising, sponsors or outside capital. I want it to remain a small, authentic, family-run, built around a community of wise investors some of whom are becoming friends.

As producing AI content becomes easy, what becomes scarce is judgement, original research, trust and a community of people who care about getting things right.

Having interacted with hundreds of you, I know how unusually engaged and thoughtful this community is. Building the Rollers Community around like-minded people – and giving it the fuel to grow – is something I particularly look forward to in the coming years.

That’s why Banker on Wheels needs a second leg to stand on. Premium Research is that leg.

It allows us to build better resources for you, preserve our independence, and keep Banker on Wheels a family-run project with a community at its heart.

Banker on Wheels will always be free to ride. Premium is what will keep the wheels turning.

And Premium Research gives us the resources to build something truly exceptional. Discover some highlights below.

Looking forward to seeing you on board.
Good luck & keep’em rolling,
Raph