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>You have to pay for the latter service. There are no public prices and you need to email some company for more details. With most businesses this means you co

>You have to pay for the latter service. There are no public prices and you need to email some company for more details. With most businesses this means you contact a salesperson who will play an extended game of "how much you got?" and the pricing AND the level of service provided will vary widely depending upon your negotiating power. The dearth of information about this 'product' sold by a 3rd party suggests something shady is probably going on. >The paper is written by economists and not technologists, and so there is no mention of CDNs or web caches Caching is a pretty poor excuse. Caches can be invalidated. And CDN basically means caching by another name. It makes much more sense (both economically and technically) that they simply crippled the free feed. Especially since it is provided by a private third party who makes bank on the people who purchase the premium edition.

lrm242 12y ago
The SEC website explicitly states: "The subscription price is set annually by Attain, LLC, using a weighted average methodology based on the number of primary feeds for subscribers at the beginning of the each year. Subscriber organizations can be invoiced annually or monthly." There are two very detailed documents on the linked website that have both business and technical details along with specifications for the service. There is nothing shady going on here.
- crdoconnor 12y ago
  No published prices + a seemingly HIGHLY profitable portion of a government service provided by a private company = something pretty shady. Even the contracts to run private prisons don't give this much opportunity to gouge. Were this service run on an at-cost basis would maybe cost $80 or so per month. $200 at most.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    "HIGHLY profitable"? Even at the highest price quoted on this thread, this looks like a rounding error --- in the sense that if you were a startup providing this information at these prices to its total addressable market, you'd have a hard time even getting funded. The number of firms that can profit from trading off realtime access to fundamentals is not large. It's a market where viable real products need to have customer lifetime values in the many millions.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
apaprocki 12y ago
You're just making allegations. It says in the contract that the subscription price is based upon how many subscribers subscribe to the service (they need to cover their costs of implementing 24/7 support and a help desk). It probably isn't public, but Google-fu turns up some older information: http://contracts.onecle.com/edgar-online/trw.svc.1998.09.11.shtml http://contracts.onecle.com/edgar-online/trw.svc.1998.09.11.... A. Broadcast Service Subscription Charge This charge will be set on October 1, 1998 based on the number of signed contracts received by that date. The table below contains a 14-month price at various subscription levels: SUBSCRIBERS AS OF OCTOBER 1, 1998 PRICE 1 to 8 $152,172 9 to 15 92,967 16 to 25 55,346 25+ 42,179
- crdoconnor 12y ago
  $150,000 = you are paying for early access to insider data. You are NOT paying for a fucking help desk at that price. Edit: downvoting does not change this fact either.
  - Hello71 12y ago
    you are being downvoted for picking a number out of context and unnecessarily provocative language.
  - ddeck 12y ago
    According to the WSJ article on this, the current price is around $1500 per month. [1] Also, note that you are paying to receive an electronic feed of a company's public SEC filings, which include filings detailing purchase and sale of stock by the company's employees, which are called "insiders" in this context. The phrase "insider data" conjures images of insider trading, which relies on trading on material non-public information, and something quite different. [1] http://online.wsj.com/articles/fast-traders-are-getting-data-from-sec-seconds-early-1414539997 http://online.wsj.com/articles/fast-traders-are-getting-data... (paywall, Google the title to bypass)
- rlucas 12y ago
GrinningFool 12y ago
"It makes much more sense (both economically and technically) that they simply crippled the free feed. Especially since it is provided by a private third party who makes bank on the people who purchase the premium edition." Not sure this makes sense at all - if the push version is better half the time, that means the other half the time the free or non-push version is better. Since "better" is a matter of seconds here, it could be something as simple as "half the time, push notifications go out before the site finishes replicating".

lrm242 12y ago

The SEC website explicitly states: "The subscription price is set annually by Attain, LLC, using a weighted average methodology based on the number of primary feeds for subscribers at the beginning of the each year. Subscriber organizations can be invoiced annually or monthly." There are two very detailed documents on the linked website that have both business and technical details along with specifications for the service. There is nothing shady going on here.

crdoconnor 12y ago
No published prices + a seemingly HIGHLY profitable portion of a government service provided by a private company = something pretty shady. Even the contracts to run private prisons don't give this much opportunity to gouge. Were this service run on an at-cost basis would maybe cost $80 or so per month. $200 at most.
- tptacek 12y ago
  "HIGHLY profitable"? Even at the highest price quoted on this thread, this looks like a rounding error --- in the sense that if you were a startup providing this information at these prices to its total addressable market, you'd have a hard time even getting funded. The number of firms that can profit from trading off realtime access to fundamentals is not large. It's a market where viable real products need to have customer lifetime values in the many millions.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

apaprocki 12y ago

You're just making allegations. It says in the contract that the subscription price is based upon how many subscribers subscribe to the service (they need to cover their costs of implementing 24/7 support and a help desk). It probably isn't public, but Google-fu turns up some older information: http://contracts.onecle.com/edgar-online/trw.svc.1998.09.11.shtml http://contracts.onecle.com/edgar-online/trw.svc.1998.09.11.... A. Broadcast Service Subscription Charge This charge will be set on October 1, 1998 based on the number of signed contracts received by that date. The table below contains a 14-month price at various subscription levels: SUBSCRIBERS AS OF OCTOBER 1, 1998 PRICE 1 to 8 $152,172 9 to 15 92,967 16 to 25 55,346 25+ 42,179

crdoconnor 12y ago
$150,000 = you are paying for early access to insider data. You are NOT paying for a fucking help desk at that price. Edit: downvoting does not change this fact either.
- Hello71 12y ago
  you are being downvoted for picking a number out of context and unnecessarily provocative language.
- ddeck 12y ago
  According to the WSJ article on this, the current price is around $1500 per month. [1] Also, note that you are paying to receive an electronic feed of a company's public SEC filings, which include filings detailing purchase and sale of stock by the company's employees, which are called "insiders" in this context. The phrase "insider data" conjures images of insider trading, which relies on trading on material non-public information, and something quite different. [1] http://online.wsj.com/articles/fast-traders-are-getting-data-from-sec-seconds-early-1414539997 http://online.wsj.com/articles/fast-traders-are-getting-data... (paywall, Google the title to bypass)
rlucas 12y ago

GrinningFool 12y ago

"It makes much more sense (both economically and technically) that they simply crippled the free feed. Especially since it is provided by a private third party who makes bank on the people who purchase the premium edition." Not sure this makes sense at all - if the push version is better half the time, that means the other half the time the free or non-push version is better. Since "better" is a matter of seconds here, it could be something as simple as "half the time, push notifications go out before the site finishes replicating".