# What alternative data actually costs

Satellite counts and card panels are sold by contract, not by price page. What the industry spends, why nobody quotes a number, and what a small buyer gets.

*https://stockmarketstack.com/guides/what-alternative-data-costs · background to Stock Market Data APIs*

**Answer:** Nobody publishes a price. Nine of ten institutional alternative-data vendors route every enquiry to a sales demo, and none states a minimum contract. The most specific public estimates come from firms that sell into the market — an average dataset earning about $1.1 million a year, and total buy-side licence spend put somewhere between $2.5 billion and $12.7 billion for 2024. The spread is the answer.

A reader who has priced a market data API arrives at alternative data expecting the same shape: a
pricing page, a free tier, a rate limit. There is none of that. This page is about what is actually
there instead, what the market spends in aggregate, and what is available to somebody who is not
a fund with a data budget.

## How it works

Alternative data is any input to financial analysis that is not a price, a filing or a press
release. The SEC's examination staff, in a
[2022 risk alert](https://www.sec.gov/files/code-ethics-risk-alert.pdf), gives the working list:
satellite and drone imagery of crop fields and retailers' car parks, analyses of aggregate credit
card transactions, social media and search data, mobile geolocation, and email data from consumer
apps.

The supply chain has three links and the reader is at the far end of none of them. Somebody
collects exhaust data for another purpose — a loyalty programme, an app SDK, a payments processor,
a satellite operator. A vendor licenses it, cleans it, maps it to tickers and turns it into a
panel. A fund buys the panel under an annual contract.

**The sales motion is the product's defining feature.** Checked in September 2026, the pricing
pages of the best-known vendors resolve to a demo request:
[Sensor Tower](https://sensortower.com/demo) says plainly that it customises pricing plans for each
customer, YipitData and Thinknum return a 404 on `/pricing` altogether, and
[Similarweb](https://www.similarweb.com/corp/pricing/) shows the split in one company — its
marketing products carry a free trial, while Stock Intelligence, the product sold to funds, carries
a talk-to-sales button.

**The one vendor that describes its pricing model still gives no number.**
[SafeGraph](https://www.safegraph.com/pricing/) sets out the axis the whole industry prices on: an
annual fee based on a custom mix of rows, columns and usage rights. That is the shape of every
contract in this market, and knowing it is more useful than any single figure.

**The sector is also consolidating, which matters for anyone evaluating a vendor.** Orbital
Insight's site now redirects to a different company. Earnest Analytics was absorbed into Consumer
Edge in 2025. [M Science](https://mscience.com/about/) states on its own About page that it is a
subsidiary of Jefferies Financial Group — a bank owns one of the named independents. And App Annie,
the subject of the enforcement action below, was renamed data.ai and later acquired by Sensor
Tower.

## What it costs

Nobody outside the contracts knows, and the published estimates come from firms that sell into this
market. That is not a reason to discard them; it is a reason to quote them with the interest
attached.

[Neudata](https://www.neudata.co/press-release/alternative-data-spending-by-investment-management-firms-could-top-15-4bn-in-2025-according-to-neudata-s-latest-report),
a data-scouting firm that sells the report these figures come from, estimated in February 2025 that
investment managers spent a minimum of $2.5 billion on alternative datasets in 2024, and that on an
adjusted methodology the true figure could have been as high as $12.7 billion. Its 2025 projection
ran from $3.3 billion to $15.4 billion.

That spread — five times between floor and ceiling, from one firm, in one sentence — is the most
honest thing anyone has published about what this market costs.

At the dataset level the same firm puts the average at about $1.1 million a year, with a minority
of datasets earning over $20 million a year from investment clients. Its own
[commentary](https://www.neudata.co/education/how-big-is-the-alternative-data-market-for-investment-managers)
adds the caveat that matters: the average is misleading, because revenue is concentrated in a small
number of datasets. It also states what the methodology excludes — internal infrastructure,
headcount, cloud services. The licence fee is the smaller half of the bill.

The only per-firm figure available is older. A
[2022 survey](https://www.lowenstein.com/news-insights/firm-news/use-of-alternative-data-in-investment-community-shows-no-signs-of-slowing-according-to-new-survey-by-lowenstein-sandler-s-investment-management-group)
by Lowenstein Sandler, a law firm that advises both buyers and sellers here, reported that nearly
three in four users of alternative data spent between $1 million and $5 million a year on it. The
firm's later survey publishes adoption rates rather than dollars, so that 2022 range is the most
recent number of its kind and should be read as four years old.

**A note on the figure you have probably seen.** The widely repeated projection of buy-side
alternative-data spend that circulated for years traced back to AlternativeData.org, a site
historically operated by one of the vendors. That domain no longer resolves. Every article still
citing it is citing something a reader cannot open, which is worth remembering whenever a market
size appears without a document behind it. No regulator publishes a spend figure at all.

## The cost that never appears on a price page

Diligence, and it falls on the buyer.

The SEC's examination staff has
[found](https://www.sec.gov/files/code-ethics-risk-alert.pdf) advisers using data from
non-traditional sources without written policies designed to address the risk of receiving
material non-public information through it — conducting, in the staff's words, ad hoc and
inconsistent diligence of providers, and lacking procedures for assessing the terms and legal
obligations attached to how the data was collected. The same alert is careful to say that
alternative data does not necessarily contain such information.

The other side of that arrangement is that the provider can be charged too. In September 2021 the
SEC [announced](https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021-176) what it described as its
first enforcement action charging an alternative-data provider with securities fraud: App Annie and
its founder settled charges concerning how the company's app-performance data was generated and
what customers were told about it, paying more than $10 million.

For a buyer, the practical reading is that a contract for a dataset carries a compliance
obligation with staff time attached, and that obligation is priced into nobody's quote.

## What you can do about it

**Start by asking whether you need a panel at all.** Most questions a private investor brings to
alternative data — who is buying, who is selling, what a fund owns — are answered by the public
disclosure record, which is free at source and catalogued here under
[insider, 13F and congressional trade trackers](https://stockmarketstack.com/categories/insider-13f-trackers). The deadlines
that make it late are set out in
[when a trade shows up in the public record](https://stockmarketstack.com/guides/when-trades-become-public).

**Look for the consumer edge of the same vendor.** Several of these companies sell a
self-serve product to marketers built on data related to what the funds buy. It is not the
investment product, the panel construction is different, and it is purchasable.

**When you do ask for a quote, ask on the industry's own axis.** Rows, columns, users and usage
rights — specifically whether you may redistribute, publish or show derived figures to clients.
That last term moves the price more than volume does, and it is the one most often discovered after
signature.

**Budget for the half of the cost that is not the licence.** Storage, pipeline work and the
compliance procedure the SEC's staff expects to see documented. A dataset that arrives as monthly
files is a data-engineering commitment before it is an edge.

**Treat every market-size figure as a sales document until you can open its source.** Every number
on this page is linked to the document it came from, and each of those documents was published by
somebody with a position in this market. There is no neutral estimate, and a figure with no
retrievable source is not a figure.

## Tools this bears on

- [Quiver Quantitative](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/quiver-quantitative.md) — US political and SEC disclosure data — congress, insiders, lobbying — over one REST API.
- [Nasdaq Data Link](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/nasdaq-data-link.md) — What Quandl became — Nasdaq's own exchange feeds plus a curated data catalogue.
- [Bigdata.com](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/bigdata-com.md) — RavenPack's self-serve retrieval API over premium news and filings, billed per token.
- [RavenPack News Analytics](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/ravenpack-news-analytics.md) — Entity-level sentiment and event tags over 40,000 news sources, licensed by contract.

## FAQ

### Can an individual buy alternative data?

Almost never at the institutional end. Satellite, card-transaction and geolocation panels are sold through a sales conversation with a custom annual licence, and the vendors publish neither a price nor a minimum. What an individual can buy is the consumer edge of the same market — app and web traffic products with self-serve tiers, and the public disclosure record, which is free.

### Why does nobody publish a price?

Because the product is not a unit. A licence is priced on how much of the dataset you take, how many columns, how many users and what you are allowed to do with the result, and every one of those varies per buyer. SafeGraph is unusual in describing that pricing axis publicly, and even that page carries no figure.

### How much does a dataset cost?

The most specific public estimate comes from Neudata, which sells research into this market — an average of about $1.1 million a year per dataset, with a minority of datasets earning over $20 million a year. Its own commentary notes the average is misleading, because revenue is concentrated in a few datasets.

### Is buying alternative data legally risky?

The risk is not in buying it but in failing to diligence it. The SEC's examination staff has flagged advisers who used alternative data without documented procedures for assessing how it was collected, and its first fraud case against a provider concerned the provider's own misrepresentations about the data. Compliance cost is a real part of the bill and never appears on a price page.

### What is the cheapest genuinely useful alternative data?

The public disclosure record — insider filings, fund holdings, congressional trades and short interest. It is the one category of non-price data with a published price, often zero, and it is fully sourced to filings anyone can check.

## Sources

1. [Alternative data spending by investment management firms could top $15.4bn in 2025](https://www.neudata.co/press-release/alternative-data-spending-by-investment-management-firms-could-top-15-4bn-in-2025-according-to-neudata-s-latest-report) — Neudata, 2025-02-26
2. [How big is the alternative data market for investment managers?](https://www.neudata.co/education/how-big-is-the-alternative-data-market-for-investment-managers) — Neudata, read 2026-09-21
3. [Use of Alternative Data in Investment Community Shows No Signs of Slowing](https://www.lowenstein.com/news-insights/firm-news/use-of-alternative-data-in-investment-community-shows-no-signs-of-slowing-according-to-new-survey-by-lowenstein-sandler-s-investment-management-group) — Lowenstein Sandler LLP, 2022-11-29. The most recent dollar range the firm has published; its 2025 report gives adoption rates and no spend figure, so this 2022 one stands.
4. [SafeGraph Pricing — Custom Data Plans for Every Team](https://www.safegraph.com/pricing/) — SafeGraph, read 2026-09-21
5. [Sensor Tower Demo](https://sensortower.com/demo) — Sensor Tower, read 2026-09-21
6. [Web Intelligence Pricing and Packages](https://www.similarweb.com/corp/pricing/) — Similarweb Ltd., read 2026-09-21
7. [M Science — About Us](https://mscience.com/about/) — M Science LLC, read 2026-09-21
8. [In the Matter of App Annie Inc. and Bertrand Schmitt, Exchange Act Release No. 92975](https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/admin/2021/34-92975.pdf) — U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, 2021-09-14. The order stands as issued; it remains the Commission's first fraud action against an alternative-data provider and is cited here for what it found.
9. [SEC Charges App Annie and its Founder with Securities Fraud, Press Release 2021-176](https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021-176) — U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, 2021-09-14. The settled order it announces has not been vacated or amended, and the press release is the Commission's own summary of it.
10. [Investment Adviser MNPI Compliance Issues, Division of Examinations Risk Alert](https://www.sec.gov/files/code-ethics-risk-alert.pdf) — U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, 2022-04-26. The landing page records no revision since publication, and no later alert supersedes the staff's stated view of alternative data diligence.

*Last updated 2026-09-21. A reference page, corrected in place — not a dated post.*