The enthusiasm for this suggests that there are many people trading frequently enough and making low enough returns that existing discount brokerage fees are significant. Are they doing HFT from home?
Perhaps more aspirational than reality. How many of us would love to write a computer program using a stock trading API just to see if we can beat the market? But the up front fees make that expensive to even try.
Check out Quantopian, where you can do just that in Python. Backtesting / paper simulation is free.