Building a Bloomberg-Style Data Stack for Jack
Bloomberg is a roughly $32,000-a-year workstation, not a single downloadable database. Most market, macro, and Kansas housing trends can be assembled from public government data plus a few affordable APIs. The chat network, evaluated bond prices, and real-time exchange licenses cannot.
Research memo for Henry McClure | mcre Media | November 13, 2026 · Central Time (CST) | Contact: (762) 291-2765
This memo answers a request to look into a database with the financial-trend access Bloomberg uses to be Bloomberg, assembled “for Jack.” Jack is not identified in the records I have, so this is written as a practical research brief for Henry and whoever Jack turns out to be. It is not a sales pitch for any vendor, and it is not a substitute for reading a license before money is spent or numbers are republished.
The short answer
There is no one database, short of Bloomberg itself, that holds everything the Terminal holds. Bloomberg’s advantage is not a secret public file. It is the combination of licensed real-time market data, proprietary pricing and research, a huge reference database, and a messaging network that connects more than 350,000 professional users. [1]
A publisher or researcher who mainly wants financial trends — rates, inflation, jobs, equities, credit conditions, and housing in places like Topeka and Kansas — can get surprisingly close on a fraction of the cost. The honest way to do that is a stack: free U.S. government series as the backbone, a modest paid API for prices and company fundamentals, and an inexpensive research screen such as Koyfin for browsing. That stack can be pulled on a schedule into a local database. It will not replace Instant Bloomberg, Bloomberg’s evaluated bond prices (BVAL), or a trading desk’s real-time exchange licenses.
Start here if the budget is tight.
Use public government data for anything that may be republished, add Koyfin Plus and Financial Modeling Prep Starter (about $68 a month at the prices on their sites today) for research and automation, and do not treat a cheap “personal use” API as a license to print vendor prices in mcre Media.
What a Bloomberg Terminal actually is, and what it costs
Bloomberg does not publish a price list. The figures that circulate in the market come from what Bloomberg has told customers. NeuGroup, reporting a customer letter dated for the January 2025 increase, said two-year subscriptions beginning or renewing on or after January 1, 2025 rose 6.5 percent. The annual price for a single Terminal became $31,980. The price for clients with two or more Terminals became $2,360 a month, or $28,320 a year per Terminal, up from $26,580. [2]
Those prices still appear to be the ones discussed in 2026 coverage, including Investopedia’s Terminal explainer. [3] I have not seen a public Bloomberg rate card that confirms them, and the final number on any contract is negotiated. Exchange and third-party data fees can sit on top of the subscription. Enterprise feeds such as B-PIPE and Data License are priced separately. Several later articles have reported a further increase for contracts starting or renewing in 2027; I did not independently verify that letter, so I am not treating a 2027 price as established. [2, 3]
The subscription is a named-user workstation: software, data, Bloomberg News, Bloomberg Intelligence research, analytics, mobile access, and Instant Bloomberg messaging. It is sold as a two-year commitment, not a casual monthly plan. That is the product people mean when they say they want “what Bloomberg uses to be Bloomberg.” [1, 2]
The data Bloomberg aggregates
Bloomberg describes the Terminal as coverage of markets, industries, companies, and securities across asset classes, plus news, proprietary and third-party research, analytics, execution tools, and a professional community. [1] In practice, the data falls into a handful of buckets.
Real-time and historical market prices cover equities, fixed income, foreign exchange, commodities, cryptocurrencies, listed derivatives, indices, money markets, municipals, preferreds, and mortgages. That includes not only last-sale prices but also yields, curves, and, for many bonds, Bloomberg’s own evaluated prices under the BVAL name. [1, 4, 5]
Company fundamentals and filings include standardized and as-reported financial statements, reference data, and links into source documents, with Bloomberg citing decades of history and coverage of more than 100,000 companies in its research-data products. Estimates, guidance, and consensus figures sit alongside that. Ownership and holder data, insider activity, and related reference fields are part of the same company stack. [6]
Economic indicators and official statistics run from U.S. and global growth, inflation, employment, and rates to calendars of upcoming releases. News and research include Bloomberg News, Bloomberg Intelligence, and third-party research. Credit and ratings data, plus credit-market analytics, are a major reason fixed-income desks stay on the Terminal. Real estate and alternative data appear both as listed real-estate securities and as broader housing, private-market, and consumer datasets; Bloomberg has also described alternative data such as consumer-card transactions in its research catalog. Chat and analytics — Instant Bloomberg, Launchpad monitors, charting, and now a conversational interface Bloomberg calls ASKB — are part of the product, not an add-on website. [1, 6]
How to cover each category without a Terminal
Prices below were checked on November 13, 2026, Central Time (CST), from vendor pages or, where a vendor does not publish a price, from a clearly labeled secondary source. Taxes, exchange add-ons, and negotiated enterprise deals can change the bill.
Market prices (equities, ETFs, FX, crypto, some commodities and options). For a free start, Massive — the company formerly called Polygon.io — offers a no-card stocks tier with end-of-day data, five calls a minute, and two years of history. Alpha Vantage’s free key is capped at 25 requests a day. Financial Modeling Prep’s Basic plan is free at 250 calls a day, end-of-day, with limited symbols. Twelve Data’s Basic plan is free at eight API credits a minute and 800 a day, including real-time U.S. equities, forex, and crypto, but only for internal, non-display use. Tiingo’s free Starter plan includes a 30-plus-year price history with tight request limits and an internal-use-only license. EODHD’s free package allows 20 API calls a day. [7–13]
Among affordable paid APIs, Financial Modeling Prep lists personal-use plans at $29 a month for Starter (real-time, 300 calls a minute, five years of history), $69 for Premium, and $139 for Ultimate, or about $19, $49, and $99 a month on annual billing. All of those listed FMP self-serve tiers are personal licenses; display or redistribution requires a separate agreement. [8]
Massive sells U.S. stocks as a separate product from options, indices, currencies, and futures. Its stocks page lists a Developer plan at $79 a month. A vendor-page check published by iTechGuides, dated September 24, 2026, lists Stocks Starter at $29 a month (15-minute delayed, five years, unlimited calls), Developer at $79 (15-minute delayed, ten years, including trades), and Advanced at $199 (real-time, 20-plus years, including quotes). That split matches the feature descriptions on Massive’s own stocks page. Financials and ratios are listed as a $29-a-month add-on on individual plans and $699 a month on business plans. Individual plans are for personal, non-professional use; customer-facing display or redistribution requires a business plan. I could not extract a complete live price table from massive.com/pricing because that page did not return its plan cards to a simple fetch. [7, 14]
Tiingo charges $30 a month, or $300 a year, for its individual Power plan, and $50 a month, or $499 a year, for internal commercial use. Redistribution is priced separately, and both listed plans are internal use only: the data may not be displayed or shared with another person or organization. [11]
Twelve Data prices by credits. Official individual monthly prices start at $29 a month for Grow (55 credits a minute, 20-plus markets) and rise through $49 and $79 on Grow, $99, $149, and $229 on Pro, and $329, $499, and $999 on Ultra. Annual billing saves 17 percent. Company use, even internal, requires a business plan, which starts at Venture for $149 a month. External display and distribution sit on the business tiers. [10]
EODHD publishes EOD Historical All-World at $19.99 a month ($199 a year), EOD plus intraday at $29.99 ($299.90 a year), Fundamentals at $59.99 ($599.90 a year), and an ALL-IN-ONE package at $99.99 a month ($999.90 a year). [12]
Alpha Vantage’s official premium page prices personal throughput at $49.99, $99.99, $149.99, $199.99, or $249.99 a month, depending on requests per minute, with annual plans two months cheaper. Real-time U.S. data requires a separate entitlement step. Commercial use is arranged with sales. [9]
Intrinio lists an Individual plan at $150 a month, personal use only, with no redistribution or display; a Startup commercial plan at $333 a month for the first six months, $666 for the next six, then $999; and Enterprise from $1,250 a month. IEX Cloud, a once-popular mid-tier API, was shut down in 2024, and IEX referred departing customers to Intrinio. [15]
Nasdaq Data Link still offers open datasets and a premium catalog, but I did not find public list prices for its premium products. Finnhub’s official pricing page did not load when I requested it on November 13, so I am not quoting a Finnhub paid price. [16]
Company fundamentals, filings, estimates, and ownership. The deepest free source is the SEC. Government-created content on sec.gov and public EDGAR filing content may be accessed and reused without a permission fee. The Commission also provides company-submission and XBRL APIs on data.sec.gov, with a published maximum access rate of ten requests per second and a requirement to declare a user agent. That covers 10-K and 10-Q financials, 8-K event notices, Forms 3, 4 and 5 insider trades, and Form 13F institutional holdings, which arrive with a legal lag after quarter-end. [17]
Paid APIs package those filings into cleaner tables. FMP’s Ultimate plan is the first of its personal tiers that includes earnings transcripts and Form 13F extracts. Koyfin, whose market data is powered by S&P Capital IQ, is often the better human screen for financials, estimates, filings, and transcripts; its official plans comparison lists Free at $0, Plus at $39 a month, Premium at $79, Advisor Core at $209, and Advisor Pro at $299, with up to 30 percent off on annual billing. Some third-party writeups describe $39 and $79 as annual-billing rates rather than the undiscounted monthly rates, so those figures should be confirmed at checkout. Koyfin is a research platform, not a redistribution license. [8, 18, 19]
YCharts does publish a rate card. Its official Plans and Pricing PDF lists a first Analyst seat at $3,000 and additional Analyst seats at $1,500; Presenter and Professional first seats at $6,300, with additional Presenter seats at $3,600 and additional Professional seats at $2,400; plus add-ons such as SMA data at $1,200 and several $600 dataset add-ons. The extracted PDF text does not explicitly print “per year,” though the amounts match the annual-seat bands commonly reported. Confirm the billing period with YCharts before treating those figures as monthly or annual. [20]
Economic indicators. This is the category where a Terminal is least necessary. The Federal Reserve Board still posts the daily H.15 selected interest rates, including federal funds, Treasury constant maturities, and bank prime, at 4:15 p.m. on business days. The latest table I opened was the November 12, 2026 release. Treasury also publishes yield-curve statistics, and Treasury Fiscal Data offers a free, no-registration API that the department says may be copied, adapted, and redistributed for non-commercial or commercial purposes. [21, 22]
FRED, from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, is the best interactive window onto more than 800,000 series from more than 100 sources, including employment, prices, GDP, and rates. It is excellent for research and for citing a graph on a blog, with attribution. It is a weaker foundation for a private warehouse. FRED’s terms encourage personal, educational, and many journalistic uses, but they restrict commercial reuse of third-party copyrighted series, forbid scraping that harms the service, and, in the API terms, prohibit storing, caching, or archiving FRED content or incorporating it into a database. For a local database, pull public-domain series from the original publishers — BLS, BEA, Census, the Fed Board, Treasury, and FHFA — and use FRED as a discovery and charting tool, not as a bulk archive. [23]
The World Bank and IMF also publish open APIs for international macro series. CFTC Commitments of Traders reports are posted publicly and are the standard free source for futures positioning. [24]
News and research. There is no inexpensive substitute for Bloomberg News or Bloomberg Intelligence. Public substitutes are SEC filings, company press releases, official statistical releases, and ordinary news sources. Selling or scraping another newsroom’s paywalled copy is not a workaround. LSEG Workspace, which includes Reuters, is the closest institutional news-and-data alternative, but it is sold by quote, not as a cheap API.
Credit, ratings, and fixed income depth. TRACE is FINRA’s system for reporting over-the-counter corporate and agency bond trades. Real-time and historic TRACE data are available to subscribers for a fee under FINRA license agreements; they are not a free public dump of every trade. Academic and aggregate reports exist, but they are not a BVAL replacement. Credit ratings from S&P, Moody’s, and Fitch are licensed products. Some rating information appears in official filings, but there is no complete free ratings database. [25, 5]
Real estate, including Kansas and Topeka. This is the category that matters most for Henry’s local work, and it is also where public data is strong. FHFA publishes House Price Index datasets and a public API; services that use the API must carry a notice that the product uses FHFA data but is not endorsed or certified by FHFA. FRED carries the all-transactions House Price Index for the Topeka, KS MSA (series ATNHPIUS45820Q), which is useful for charts, subject to the FRED terms above. HUD User provides fair-market rents and related housing datasets under its own API terms. Census ACS and QuickFacts cover income, rents, home values, and demographics for Topeka and Shawnee County. [26–28]
Zillow Research posts downloadable ZHVI home-value indexes, rent indexes, inventory, and affordability measures “for use in your own analyses.” Redfin’s Data Center offers regional housing downloads, including metrics that can be searched by region name. Both are valuable for internal trend work. They are not a blanket license to republish raw files or to scrape listings. For anything that will appear in mcre Media, attribute clearly and get written permission if the use is commercial or goes beyond a cited chart. [29, 30]
CoStar is the usual institutional source for commercial real estate. It does not publish a standard self-serve price; sales has to be asked. I am not treating informal online estimates as facts. PitchBook, the usual private-markets database, likewise sells by quote; its public pricing page did not return a usable list when I requested it. FactSet, LSEG Workspace, S&P Capital IQ, and Morningstar Direct are also quote-only. Third-party compilations often place those desktop products in a broad band below a Bloomberg seat and well above the affordable APIs in this memo. Those compilations are not vendor rate cards, and I would not budget from them without a quote. [31, 32]
Licensing: the catch if this is used in mcre Media
The legal difference between “I can look this up” and “I can put this in the paper or on the blog” is larger than the price difference. Most low-cost market APIs are licensed for personal or internal use. Financial Modeling Prep says display or redistribution requires a specific agreement. Tiingo’s $30 and $50 plans are internal use only. Twelve Data’s individual plans are for personal, non-commercial use; company use needs a business plan. Massive and Intrinio individual plans do not include redistribution or customer-facing display. Koyfin and YCharts are research and reporting tools, not wholesale data licenses. [8, 10, 11, 7, 15]
By contrast, SEC EDGAR public filing content is free to reuse. Treasury Fiscal Data is explicitly free for commercial or non-commercial reuse. Many BLS, BEA, Census, Fed, and FHFA series can be cited and republished with attribution and without false claims of endorsement, subject to each agency’s terms. That is the safe backbone for anything written for the public. [17, 22, 26]
A practical rule.
Use paid market APIs and Koyfin to do the research. Use government and other explicitly reusable series in what gets published. If a vendor price, estimate, or evaluated yield needs to appear in mcre Media, buy a display or redistribution license first, or quote the official primary source instead.
Three practical stacks
These stacks emphasize macro trends, markets, and real estate relevant to Kansas and Topeka. They assume research and writing, not a trading floor. Prices are monthly list prices from the sources above, before tax, and can move.
Free. Do the human research in Koyfin’s free plan and in FRED. Build the warehouse from original government publishers: Treasury Fiscal Data and the H.15 and Treasury yield curve for rates and federal finance; BLS, BEA, and Census for jobs, inflation, income, and local demographics; CFTC for futures positioning; FHFA, HUD, and Census ACS for housing, including the Topeka MSA house-price index. Add Zillow Research and Redfin downloads for internal housing analysis. Use SEC EDGAR and the SEC APIs for filings, insider trades, and 13F holdings. Use the free tiers at Massive, FMP, Twelve Data, Alpha Vantage, and Tiingo only inside their rate limits and license limits. This stack will not give reliable real-time professional market data, a deep estimates database, or a license to republish vendor prices. It will support a serious weekly macro and Topeka housing brief.
Roughly under $100 a month. The combination I would actually use is Koyfin Plus at $39 a month, for a Capital IQ-powered research screen with longer financials, estimates, filings, and transcripts, plus Financial Modeling Prep Starter at $29 a month, for an API that can feed a database with U.S. prices, quotes, and fundamentals, plus the entire free government and housing layer. That is about $68 a month. A close alternative is to spend the budget on EODHD’s ALL-IN-ONE package at $99.99 a month, which bundles global end-of-day prices, fundamentals, and some real-estate price indices, and keep Koyfin at the free tier unless the better screen is worth the extra $39. Massive Starter at $29 a month is a strong add if delayed U.S. tape and flat files matter more than fundamentals. I would not choose Tiingo’s $30 Power plan if the end use includes sharing or publishing, because that plan is internal use only. Twelve Data Grow at $29 can work for personal exploration; it is the wrong license if a company or a public site will use the data. [18, 8, 12, 7, 11, 10]
Roughly $500 to $2,000 a month. Stay in self-serve products rather than jumping to a Bloomberg or FactSet quote. A strong working set is Koyfin Premium at $79 a month, or Advisor Pro at $299 if client-style reporting is needed; Massive Advanced at $199 a month for real-time U.S. stocks and long tick history, remembering that this is still an individual, non-professional license unless a business plan is purchased; and FMP Ultimate at $139 a month for broader fundamentals, estimates, transcripts, and 13F. That package is about $417 to $637 a month before add-ons, and it still sits on the free government and housing layer. If commercial display rights are required, Intrinio’s Startup plan starts at $333 a month and rises to $999, which can consume most of this band. YCharts Professional, at a $6,300 first-seat price on the official PDF, belongs in this conversation if the need is an advisor research and proposal platform rather than an API warehouse, once the billing period is confirmed. This budget still does not buy CoStar, PitchBook, FactSet, LSEG Workspace, Capital IQ, or a Bloomberg seat. [18, 7, 14, 8, 15, 20]
How to combine it into one database, and what I can automate
The right picture is not “one vendor replaces Bloomberg.” It is a small warehouse with a license tag on every table. I would keep raw extracts in DuckDB or Postgres, not in a single giant Google Sheet. A Sheet is a good window for browsing and charting a curated slice; it is a poor system of record. Each table should store the series identifier, geography (United States, Kansas, Topeka MSA, and so on), frequency, units, source URL, as-of date, and license class: reusable, internal-only, or permission required.
- 1
Stand up the warehouse
Create separate schemas for macro, markets, filings, and housing. Start with government series that may be republished, then add vendor tables behind an internal-only flag.
- 2
Schedule the pulls
After the close for daily market and Treasury data; on release day for BLS, BEA, and Census; monthly for FHFA, HUD, Zillow Research, and Redfin files; continuously, within SEC rate limits, for new filings.
- 3
Build a human layer
A short dashboard or a curated Google Sheet for the series actually watched, plus a weekly brief. Do not live inside the raw API output.
- 4
Keep FRED in its lane
Use FRED to find and chart series. For anything stored locally, prefer the original public publisher so the project does not run through FRED’s API archiving restrictions.
What I can automate, if asked: a recurring pull of the government and licensed APIs into that warehouse; a weekly or monthly Kansas and Topeka brief covering house prices, rents, income, jobs, mortgage rates, and national market context; alerts when watched companies file 8-Ks or when major official releases hit; draft charts and source notes for mcre Media drawn from reusable series; and a reminder when a paid plan is up for renewal. What I cannot do is sign a vendor contract, pay for a plan, or publish vendor-licensed figures in Henry’s name without a display right and his approval of the piece.
What cannot be replicated
Real-time exchange licenses are the first hard ceiling. The official last-sale tape and especially proprietary exchange feeds are licensed by the exchanges themselves. Cheap APIs either delay the data, limit it to non-professional use, or roll exchange issues into a business contract. A $29 or $199 plan is not the same thing as a professional, display-licensed, low-latency feed. [7, 15]
Bloomberg’s evaluated pricing, including BVAL, is the second. TRACE can tell you where a bond actually traded. BVAL is a proprietary valuation for a much wider universe, including bonds that did not trade, and it is a Bloomberg product, not a public file. There is no honest open-data clone of it. [5, 25]
The chat network is the third. Instant Bloomberg is valuable because the other people on it are there. Bloomberg says the Terminal reaches a network of more than 350,000 decision makers. No API budget buys that community, and no private database replaces it. [1]
The same honesty applies to Bloomberg News and Bloomberg Intelligence; to the deepest institutional estimate and ownership systems; to complete agency credit-rating feeds; to CoStar-grade commercial property comparables; and to municipal and OTC fixed-income coverage at desk quality. Those are reasons a bank still pays for a Terminal. They are not required to follow interest rates, earnings seasons, or Topeka housing affordability.
Research limits
Research cutoff: November 13, 2026, Central Time (CST). Bloomberg, FactSet, LSEG, S&P Capital IQ, Morningstar Direct, CoStar, PitchBook, and Nasdaq Data Link premium products do not publish a complete public price list; reported ranges from secondary sites are not used here as established list prices. Massive’s main pricing page did not return a full live table to my fetch; Starter and Advanced dollar amounts are taken from a September 24, 2026 vendor-page check that matches Massive’s published feature split, and should be rechecked on massive.com before anyone pays. Finnhub’s pricing page timed out. PitchBook’s pricing page also timed out. Koyfin and YCharts billing periods should be confirmed at checkout. I did not open customer contracts, and I did not negotiate any quote. License terms can change, and they should be read in full before a paid plan is used in a publication or a shared database.
I have not assumed who Jack is. Once that is clear — a person, a bot, a partner, or an internal project — the stack can be tightened around the actual workflow.
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