I chart with NT (free version) and to avoid pacing violations, I left my desktop on 24/7 :D :D so far find no need to buy the licences
I manually put my orders in TWS anyway
Multicharts used to have a free version and it seems they killed that as well
I was thinking to give Multichart TWS another try and just found it disappeared from TWS menu.
I am using NT 7, but loading data from IB is slow and pacing violations all over my screen....