Redistribution
Data reaching anyone outside the organisation that licensed it: a customer, a public web page, an app, a chart in a paid newsletter. Exchanges and vendors price it as its own line on the schedule, separately from internal use and from per-user display fees, and they bill it per feed before a single subscriber exists. It is the word that turns a side project into a commercial contract.
How it works
Every market-data schedule splits usage in two. Internal use stops inside your own organisation: your screens, your models, your staff. Redistribution is the data reaching anyone else — a customer, a subscriber, a reader, a bot, an app store listing. The line is about where the number ends up, not how many people look at it or whether money changes hands.
The second half is licensed separately, and it is priced in a shape that surprises people coming from ordinary software pricing: per feed, per venue, as an annual or monthly figure that is due before a single end user exists. On the NYSE pricing guide dated 14 May 2026, redistributing NYSE Integrated costs 4,400 dollars a month. On the OPRA fee schedule dated February 2026, redistributing US listed options data is 1,500 dollars a month. Cboe's price list of 30 July 2026 charges 5,000 dollars a month for external distribution of Cboe One Summary. The London Stock Exchange's Schedule A, effective 1 January 2026, prices redistribution of real-time UK data at 37,083 pounds a year for professional users and 8,215 for private investors — again, before the first subscriber.
A vendor that sells you an API has already paid one of these. It holds a distributor licence, reports subscriber counts to each venue monthly, and passes per-user fees through with margin on top. What it sells you is normally a seat, not a licence to do the same thing one layer down.
What it looks like on a card
This is why the access block on a card is not decoration. A free or developer tier usually carries an explicit internal-use condition — Twelve Data's free tier says so in as many words — and a tier that permits redistribution is a different product with a different price. Vendors whose whole business is republishing, such as Databento or Intrinio, will quote you a redistribution licence; a consumer-priced API usually will not, at any tier.
Government and central-bank series are the exception that proves the rule. Most are free to republish with attribution, which is why so many public dashboards are built on them. Even there the container and the contents differ: FRED's own API terms require the attribution notice, and FRED hosts third-party series it does not own, so the archive being free does not make every series inside it republishable.
Why it matters here
Four questions decide whether a data source can carry a product, and this is the one that most often turns a working prototype into something that cannot ship. It is also the cheapest to answer early: the answer is in the terms of service, not the pricing page, and it is a licensing question rather than a technical one.
Two practical consequences. First, if the data is going in front of other people, price the redistribution licence before you build on the API, not after — the figures above are the floor, per venue. Second, delayed and end-of-day data exist precisely for this case, carry far lighter terms and no per-user counting, and are what almost every free financial site on the internet is actually serving. What real-time market data costs walks the whole fee stack, and what is genuinely free covers the sources whose licences permit republishing outright.
The sibling word is non-display use, which is about a program rather than a person reading the number. A public app that also acts on the data automatically is usually both, licensed twice.
Where you will meet this
The cards where this changes a decision, then the rest that use the word.
Sources
- NYSE Proprietary Market Data Pricing Guide — New York Stock Exchange,
- Options Price Reporting Authority Fee Schedule — Options Price Reporting Authority,
- Cboe Data Services US Market Data Product Price List — Cboe Global Markets,
- London Stock Exchange Market Data, Schedule A — Price List and Data Products — London Stock Exchange,
- FRED API Terms of Use — Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, read
FAQ
Is a public Discord bot that posts quotes redistribution?
Yes. The test is not how many people see the number or whether you charge for it — it is whether the data leaves the organisation that licensed it. A bot, a status page, a public dashboard and a screenshot feed all put an exchange's data in front of third parties, which is the licensed act. Delayed or end-of-day data is what almost every public site uses instead.
Does a paid API subscription include the right to show the data to my users?
Not by default. A retail or developer tier is normally internal use only, and the right to redistribute is a different contract at a different price. It is stated in the vendor's terms rather than on the pricing page, so it is worth asking before the prototype becomes a product.
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