Order flow, free.
Footprint charts, delta, imbalance and absorption are free on Basis. This is the feature category that normally costs the most, and here it costs nothing and needs no account.
What you get
- Volume footprint: buy and sell volume at every price level inside each bar
- Delta per level and per bar, from the venue’s own taker side rather than inferred from the close
- Buy and sell imbalances, with stacked imbalances marked
- Absorption: where aggressive volume arrived and price did not move
- Cumulative volume delta as a study, and a session point of control on the footprint
Why this is usually paid for
Order flow tooling is the most expensive category in retail trading software. Dedicated footprint platforms are subscription products, and the ones bundled into charting suites sit on the top tier.
The reason is partly cost — trade-at-price data is heavy — and partly that it is the last feature people will pay for. Basis loads the tape into your browser and renders it there, which removes the first reason, and does not have a top tier, which removes the second.
How to use it
- 1
Open the chart on footprint
The button below opens the terminal with the volume footprint already selected. Use a lower timeframe than usual — footprint is a bar-internals view and a daily bar has too much inside it to read.
- 2
Read delta before anything else
Delta is aggressive buying minus aggressive selling. A green bar with negative delta means price rose while sellers were the ones crossing the spread, which is not the same market as a green bar with positive delta.
- 3
Look for absorption at the extremes
Heavy volume at a price with almost no movement afterwards means someone was filling into it. Absorption at a low is where reversals start; absorption at a high is where rallies end.
- 4
Treat stacked imbalances as levels
Several consecutive price levels all imbalanced the same way marks a zone the market moved through aggressively. Those zones tend to matter when price returns to them.
Questions
Is the footprint chart free?+
Yes, with no account and no trial period. Basis has no paid tier, so order flow is not held back from one. Open the terminal, switch to volume footprint and the ladders build from the live tape.
Where does the buy and sell split come from?+
From the exchange. Each trade carries a flag saying whether the buyer or the seller was the aggressor — which side crossed the spread — and the footprint uses that directly. It is measured, not inferred from whether a bar closed up or down, which is what indicators like OBV have to do.
How much history can I see?+
As much tape as your browser has loaded. Trade-at-price data is far heavier than candles, so it loads lazily as you look at a period rather than all at once. Recent sessions fill in quickly; going a long way back takes longer and is bounded by what the venue serves.
What is the difference between footprint and volume profile?+
A footprint shows the volume ladder inside each individual bar, so you can see how a single move was built. A volume profile aggregates a whole session into one ladder, so you can see where the session as a whole did its business. They answer different questions and Basis has both.
Does it work on perpetual futures?+
Yes, and perpetuals are where most crypto order flow actually happens. Spot and perpetual are separate markets with separate tape, so read the one you intend to trade.
Open it and see
The chart opens with this already turned on. Nothing to configure, nothing to sign up for.
Open the chartAlso free
Updated 2026-08-23 · Indicator reference · Documentation · Terminal