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Comment by siracguy | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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5 pages of data per month, correct. Free tier is primarily to explore what we can do for you. Trial period idea makes sense, let us get further feedback and we can do that instead of a free-forever, but restricted, tier. Thoughts, HN community?

Koyfin has had to shut itself down during market hours because they don't have the money to maintain uptime. We provide 100 percent uptime, 100 percent of the time. With us, you can count on your data being available, whenever you need it.

> We provide 100 percent uptime, 100 percent of the time.

I know what you mean in relation to that point, but 100% uptime isn't realistic so I'd be careful with calling it that. There's a reason Amazon and other big companies only provide several nines of uptime guarantees.

Fair

Here's a reason to think about trial period rather than very limited functionality free-forever.

I don't know who you are targeting, but I would imagine that the customer sweet spot for you would be the intersection of: - Traders who are engaged enough and delve deeply enough to need Bloomberg-type data, beyond what is provided by the typical broker pages/Yahoo Finance/SEC/Seeking Alpha/fintwit/newsletters/company disclosures (which are all very low cost or free and sufficient I would think for casual users) - And yet, who are not professionals with access to the Bloomberg terminal

I suspect that this is a very small but growing group. The characteristics of this group is that they will be careful with money (it comes out of their pocket, not their employer) but if they find a tool that is actually useful and an aid to generating alpha, they have sufficient AUM that it is worthwhile to pay a reasonable monthly fee to access it.

FWIW, I'm not sure how much the uptime during market hours will be critical other than for day traders. Most of the traders in this group will also have day jobs.

This is all very unscientific and not based on data, I'm just going off my experiences and those of others I know who are in a similar boat.

P.S. Unless you're trying to disrupt the Bloomberg terminal itself for professionals, in which case please disregard this entire comment.

Thanks for this very well thought-out response. Will implement much of these thoughts

In my opinion you should be careful claiming 100% uptime since it feels that you are just throwing numbers out there. Especially with other comments in this thread stating that this doesn’t appear to be 90% of data.

And claim about competitor failure without any proof, especially given uptime fiasco in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31878014

> Koyfin has had to shut itself down during market hours because they don't have the money to maintain uptime.

That was an April Fools joke. I've never seen them go down.

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