To get live data from ICE--the exchange that withdrew the request--I'm currently paying a broker $120/month.
By comparison, just about every crypto exchange currently offers push feeds and historical data for free. In most cases you don't even need to sign in.
In some sense this is a measure of the immaturity of crypto markets.
But it's also a reminder that with main institutional players moving in, the barriers to entry will go way up.
We'll probably start to see more brokers and vendors and more consolidation/buyouts of the crypto exchanges.
As a fund manager, I wish there was a data warehousing service I could pay for with a queryable by the minute (or better granularity) API that captured multiple exchanges across multiple countries for the top 50 coins.
I would pay a lot monthly for that product. Such a pro-level service doesn't exist at all yet.
Also there aren't any derivatives or futures to speak of yet (don't point out the existing futures markets, they have no volume).
If you're interested in building this, you can easily stream data at any scale into Google's BigQuery [1] from any number of clients, using simple HTTP POST requests, and then have a single SQL-queryable interface to that data.
Reading what you describe, I think Coinigy does this currently. I have a premium account and use it as an 'exchange aggregator' for my trade portfolio, to trade on and trade between many different exchanges with many trade pairs, and I believe it offers an API so that I could essentially abstract their frontend from the process. I pay about 20 dollars a month.
I believe that as small exchanges are attempting to gain market share, giving away their data makes sense. They need to advertise the liquidity on their market in order to attract business. As exchanges get bigger, they reach a point where they think, "You know what, there are a lot of people who can't run their business without quotes from our exchange." And they start charging for data. And it's true, and furthermore, there are large financial institutions that are farily price insensitive. So they keep raising and raising prices. I don't have any hard evidence of what the end result is. Price equilibrium? Implosion of liquidity because nobody wants to buy their data any more?
Given the volume of data from ICE, $120/month is reasonable. I don't think they price data to profit from it -- just to ensure their systems are used by serious actors.
By comparison, just about every crypto exchange currently offers push feeds and historical data for free. In most cases you don't even need to sign in.
In some sense this is a measure of the immaturity of crypto markets.
But it's also a reminder that with main institutional players moving in, the barriers to entry will go way up.
We'll probably start to see more brokers and vendors and more consolidation/buyouts of the crypto exchanges.