Education
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All Asset Classes. Zero Exchange Fees.
Market data spend hit $50 billion in 2025. Much of it pays for licences, not data. What sits on a market data bill, and what Pyth Pro leaves off it.
Your market data bill is not just a bill for data. It can include the vendor fee, the exchange fee, the right to redistribute the data and the cost of proving that everyone used it correctly.
Global spending on financial market data and analysis reached $49.2 billion in 2025, up 6.5% from the year before. Pyth Pro takes a different approach.
Market participants contribute prices directly to Pyth, which aggregates them and delivers them through one API. The result is one subscription across equities, ETFs, FX, commodities, fixed income and crypto with no exchange fees passed through.
Anatomy of a market data bill
Real-time market data rarely arrives as a single line item. A firm adding live U.S. equity prices to a client-facing app typically pays at four layers.
The vendor. A terminal, feed provider or aggregator charges for access and delivery.
The exchange. Exchanges may charge their own fees under separate agreements for data included in a feed. Vendors will often pass these charges through on top of their own price.
Distribution. Moving the data inside the firm, or out to clients, often triggers distributor fees and may require a separate approval.
Compliance. Firms generally need to count users, classify them, report usage every month and keep records ready for an audit.
A glossary of market data fees
Fee | What it pays for |
|---|---|
Subscriber (display) fee | Each person or device that can see the data on a screen, billed monthly |
Professional vs non-professional | The same data priced differently depending on who the user is. Firms classify and report every user |
Non-display fee | Use by machines rather than people: algorithms, risk engines, pricing models |
Distributor fee | Passing data around the firm (internal) or to clients (external) |
Redistribution | The right to give data to a third party through an API, an app or a partner. Usually the most restricted right, often subject to approval |
Derived data | Values calculated from licensed data, such as indices, signals or model outputs. Separate licensing or fees may apply, particularly where the original data can be reconstructed. |
Enterprise licence | A flat or negotiated fee that can replace per-user charges for larger organizations. |
Administration fees | Fixed monthly charges for holding the licence |
The costs that do not appear on the invoice
Classification and reporting. Users may need to be classified and counted, with usage reported to each data owner, often monthly. Late or inaccurate reports can carry penalties.
Audits. Exchanges and vendors audit their licensees to check that usage matches the contract. Lookback periods are typically 36 months, and supply can be suspended until findings are settled.
Annual increases. Average vendor renewal increases for major data vendors ran at 18% in 2023, 15% in 2024 and 10% in 2025.
Uneven pricing. Research from Substantive Research found some clients paying up to 13 times more than peers for similar products.
Why the stack looks like this
Generally, each layer licenses the one beneath it. A venue licenses its data to a vendor. The vendor licenses it to a firm. The firm licenses it again to its own clients. Rights are negotiated at every step, and every step adds terms.
The model was built for terminals on desks. It fits less well when the consumer is an API, a trading app, an onchain market or an AI agent, and when one firm wants equities, FX, commodities and crypto through a single integration.
The Pyth Pro model
Pyth Pro starts from a different place. Prices are contributed first-party by the exchanges, trading firms, market makers and banks that create them, aggregated by Pyth and delivered through one API. Pyth Pro’s aggregate prices are not subject to exchange fees passed through to the subscriber.
For a Pyth Pro subscriber, that means:
No exchange fees
No pass-through audits
No per-user counting or professional / non-professional classification
One subscription across equities, ETFs, FX, commodities, fixed income and crypto
Published pricing, with standardised terms for clients whether direct or through a redistributor
The subscription is the cost. The price on the invoice is the price.
What changes in practice
Adding an asset class means adding symbols, not signing a new contract. Launching a client-facing app does not start a new negotiation over redistribution rights. Access is self-serve: a firm can sign up on Pyth Terminal, complete KYC, accept terms, set up billing and start receiving data in under an hour.
See Pyth Pro pricing on the Terminal.
