Hey,<p>Wanted to share what my friend and I built — Feather. It provides investors with all imaginable financial data, without breaking the bank. Effectively 90 percent of the Bloomberg Terminal, at 5 percent of the price.<p>We just opened sign ups for early access — all you need to sign up is your email address. We’ll open access to the software in order of sign ups, and we’d love to have you onboard.<p>Check it out!<p><a href="https://try-feather.com" rel="nofollow">https://try-feather.com</a>
Looking at it, it appears to cover only equities and ignores all other financial products, which renders the "90%" claim risible. To claim that a good example of the other 10% is the location of oil tankers is either deliberately misleading or highly misinformed.<p>I don't doubt you've put some effort into making a good platform, but anyone can make a deal with some exchanges to get their trade feed.<p>Fixed Income products are Bloomberg's main strength, and in that world there are no shortcuts - you have to get as many bond traders as possible to send you their pricing. Bloomberg prices millions of fixed income products based on thousands of sources. Not to mention that a lot of the bond trading itself happens via the Bloomberg messagaing system.
As a user of the Bloomberg, you've not even got 0.1% of the stuff they've got. The data set it looks like you have available is the standard SEC database, which is available freely anyway.
FWIW, I think the comparison with Bloomberg is a bit of a distraction. It seems unlikely that you can live up to that 90% claim, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a good product or good value. It looks like you’re targeting a different market than Bloomberg users. I took a quick look at your site and found the framing there much more compelling than the direct dig at Bloomberg here.<p>Not a marketer though, so what do I know. Good luck!
As someone who’s used Bloomberg in a professional setting, this is more like 1% of the data for 5% of the cost. This doesn’t even have an Excel plugin or any other API. For people looking for an alternative, I recommend Refinitiv Eikon, which actually is 90% of the data for 50% of the cost and it has a native Python API and no rate limits on data.
It would be a great idea for you to buy Bloomberg and Eikon and actually play with them before making the 90% claim.<p>From cheaper alternatives, how does it compare to TradingView?<p>I use it and I like it - I don’t miss any data on equities, but economy data is quite limited - it has series from FRED so for example US employment or very basic mortgages data but no more good sources.
This isn’t 90% of Bloomberg at all. Bloombergs value is provided through combining the data for you, and getting you that data the instant it’s published. There’s also value in the network effects via chat and Craigslist like marketplace for traders.
About the Bloomberg comparison:<p>It has certainly attracted attention on HN, so it wasn't pointless.<p>I might be somewhat close to your target demographic and personally have a vague notion of the Bloomberg terminal as a thing you use for high-profile trading, not much more, so I can't do anything with the 90%. I would also think that you're targeting the same people who'd otherwise use one, so not me.<p>What might catch me (without offending people who know more about the terminal) would be something like "The [equivalent of a] Bloomberg terminal for [your target audience]".
You really need to ditch the Bloomberg terminal comparison.<p>People who know what the Bloomberg Terminal is are going to be disappointed by your product because it's not even remotely in the same realm of capability.<p>People who don't know what it is (which I'm guessing is actually your target audience) are either not going to understand, or will learn, then be disappointed that what you offer doesn't come close.<p>If you just ditch that comparison and describe honestly, clearly and precisely what your product does (apparently, provide basic financial data), everyone should be happy.
90% of Bloomberg terminal or 90% of the data available on a Bloomberg terminal?<p>Bloomberg terminals have tons of apps, messaging, trading, APIs and so much more.<p>Even with your data how do you compensate for not having access to Bloomberg entity IDs for issuers?<p>I have no idea who you are but I’m rooting for you. I literally hate Bloomberg (the company) and have done everything I can in my career to stop using their services (Bloomberg Server API, Bloomberg Data License, etc) but getting rid of terminals is probably harder than repealing the second amendment.
Looks great. Basic question, how are you able to verify the data that Bloomberg Terminal provides is what you offer without breaking the bank?<p>I am making a guess here because the data they provide to their customer validates their price tag. What is that 10% that Bloomberg is able to charge their customer the premium price tag?
As an advanced(!) retail trader, this looks very interesting. I haven't signed up yet. Looking at your pricing structure, I don't quite understand - does the free tier mean that once you look at five pages of data, your free usage is over? Or does it refer to being able to create five custom data pages, and then payment if you go over?
If it's the former, I think it would be helpful to have some sort of trial period where you can use the site. I don't want to use up my "five free pages" just clicking around to see what is there.<p>As an aside, Koyfin has some similar functionality, perhaps not with as much data, and they have a free tier where you can build some custom pages (e.g. watchlists). The paid tier starts if you want more of those.
Part of Bloomberg's value is, counterintuitively, <i>because</i> it's so expensive. This limits the user network to people who can afford it, typically professional traders at major firms.
I do not like the claim of 1.1 billion points of data. This is meaningless. For me, this says a few GBs of data which isn't that impressive. I'm not sure how you came up with this number, but you could, for example, have a record of the stock price of 1000 companies for every minute for the last 20 years that would get you there.<p>I have no experience in marketing so maybe average customers don't worry about this. But, to me, it seems like a red flag as your spinning something average into something extraordinary.
Do you mean to say this offers 90% of the value of Bloomberg terminal, or 90% of the features?
I think I understand what it is you mean, perhaps there’s a better way to word it? I took a look at your website and actually see a lot of value in this product for the average investor.. who isn’t making use of Bloomberg’s more institutional oriented features eg fixed income. Personally interested. Good luck with the launch!
A lot of comments seem to (correctly) focus on the fact that this does not appear to cover anywhere near 90% of Bloomberg's data. So I'd just like to throw out that this still looks really useful! Just not sure who'd be paying $99/month for that, as a retail trader it's really hard to quantify your personal ROI for such data (that is freely available anyway). But good luck to you!
This is essentially re-packaged public equities data. Not at all comparable to what a Bloomberg Anywhere or terminal subscription offers. So, right off the bat, your marketing line is going to push your target customers away.<p>And as others point out, data provenance and data quality are a pre-requisite to anyone seriously considering anything alongside Bloomberg, let alone as a substitute.<p>On the plus side, I bet it likely doesn’t have that prehistorical pre-windows, stone-age Bloomberg UI.
Do you have any background in financial software services? Your use of language and execution here tells me you don't understand the business at all<p>> <i>Great data shouldn’t cost $25,000 per year. Now, it doesn’t. Feather offers all the financial data necessary to boost your investment performance, for only $99 per month. That’s 95 percent less than any alternative.</i><p>In simple parlance that's false advertising because this isn't remotely "an alternative"
<i>Effectively 90 percent of the Bloomberg Terminal, at 5 percent of the price.</i><p>Great example of the 'fake it till you make it' ethos. If you're gonna lie, lie big.
How does it compare to something like Tradytics or Trend Spider? I've been a subscriber to the former for over a year + Trading View for charting.<p><a href="https://tradytics.com/" rel="nofollow">https://tradytics.com/</a><p><a href="https://trendspider.com/" rel="nofollow">https://trendspider.com/</a><p><a href="https://www.tradingview.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.tradingview.com/</a>
How different is this from YCharts? I was always fascinated by YCharts business model.<p>(Update: based on this, looks like it's quite a bit cheaper at the entry level, for starters -- <a href="https://www.g2.com/products/ycharts/pricing" rel="nofollow">https://www.g2.com/products/ycharts/pricing</a> ...)
FYI, exchange subscriptions and data are charged on top of the Bloomberg subscription. You are paying for a lot more than just data, its all the tooling on top of it.
Also, if anybody would like an in-advance product demo, please don't hesitate to reach out at ash@try-feather.com and I'll walk you through it :)
how does this differ (aside from cost) from the free and open source OpenBB terminal?
<a href="https://openbb.co/" rel="nofollow">https://openbb.co/</a>