We are currently the latter; we're powered by existing brokerages, but are working to become our own.
I was thinking a lot about this idea lately. An API/programmatic-first brokerage/trading platform. Let people design automated trading strategies on top of solid APIs, and use your site for visualization/planning. OptionAlpha seems to get into this but not nearly far enough. Latency wouldn't be critical either for retail investing.
I don't really understand why it doesn't exist. IB is probably the closest well known broker. There are some other smaller ones with better APIs.
Also agree, re: API tooling. We'd love to find folks who want to write code against our API. Is that something you'd use?
That's definitely what I'm thinking. There are so many tools out there to visualize strategies, profit/loss, scanners for various properties like IV, open interest, volume, etc in the case of options. But very few platforms go to the next level and provide good APIs to manipulate. It would be extremely impressive to offer both data and trade execution via modern APIs. I've wondered if that's an untapped market, or else why someone hasn't jumped on it :)
Are you a brokerage or is this something that can hook into your existing brokerage? The latter would be awesome.