What a real-time market news feed actually costs
Verified from each vendor's own public pricing page on 13 August 2026. Every number below carries the URL it came from. Where a vendor does not publish a price, the cell is blank — we do not estimate.
| Feed | Entry price | Top published tier | Annual-billing price | News in real time? | Free tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Benzinga Pro pro.benzinga.com/pricing |
$37 / mo | $197 / mo (Essential) | $30.58 / mo (17% off) | Yes — newsfeed + audio squawk on paid tiers; squawk add-on +$99/mo | 14-day trial |
| Finviz Elite finviz.com/elite.ashx |
$39.50 / mo | $39.50 / mo (single tier) | $299.50 / yr = $24.96 / mo | Real-time quotes on Elite; news is aggregated headlines, not a wire | 7-day Elite trial |
| Koyfin koyfin.com/pricing |
$0 / mo | $79 / mo (Premium) | not shown on page | Research/charting platform — not a latency-focused news wire | Yes — $0 plan |
| Bloomberg Terminal no public pricing page |
not published | not published | not published | Yes — the institutional benchmark | No |
| Top Tier Newswire toptiernewswire.com |
$0 / mo | shown at checkout | shown at checkout | Pro tier is real-time; 40+ sources aggregated, sentiment tagging, watchlists | Yes — free delayed feed |
The one number everybody quotes wrong
Benzinga Pro's pricing page shows $30.58/mo next to its Basic plan. That is the annual-billing figure. Pay month to month and it is $37/mo — 21% higher, and $443 over a year rather than $367. The same split runs up the whole ladder: Streamlined is $147/mo monthly vs $124.75/mo annual, Essential $197/mo vs $166.42/mo.
Finviz Elite does the same thing in the other direction: the headline is $39.50/mo, but the annual plan is $299.50/yr, which is $24.96/mo — a 37% discount for committing a year up front.
Rule of thumb when you compare feeds: force every quote onto the same billing basis before you compare, and add any squawk/add-on line separately. Benzinga's High Beta Squawk is a +$99/mo add-on, not part of any listed tier — that alone is larger than a whole Finviz Elite subscription.
What "real-time" actually means here
These products are not the same category, which is why straight price comparison misleads:
- Wire / squawk products (Benzinga Pro, Bloomberg, Top Tier Newswire) sell latency — headlines arriving seconds after the source publishes. Benzinga's own marketing page positions this against "Bloomberg at $30,000/year" and claims wire exclusives "5–15 minutes before mainstream sources." (vendor's own claim, quoted from pro.benzinga.com/pricing, 13 Aug 2026 — not independently measured here)
- Screener / research platforms (Finviz, Koyfin) sell data breadth. Real-time quotes on a paid tier is not the same as a real-time news feed, and the two get conflated constantly in "best news app" roundups.
If your edge depends on reacting to a headline, the metric that matters is time-to-headline and source count, not chart features. If you are doing end-of-day research, paying wire prices for latency you never use is the expensive mistake.
Want to see what a sub-2-second, 40+ source feed looks like before you pay for one?
Top Tier Newswire runs a free delayed tier — same feed, same sentiment tagging and watchlists, just time-shifted. It is the cheapest way to sanity-check whether latency is actually your bottleneck before you commit $37–$197/mo to a wire.
Method & limits
- Every price was read off the vendor's own public pricing page on 13 August 2026, not from memory: pro.benzinga.com/pricing, finviz.com/elite.ashx, koyfin.com/pricing.
- Blank is not zero. Bloomberg publishes no price, so it is blank — the widely-repeated "$30,000/year" figure appears here only as a quote from a competitor's marketing page, which is not a source we would rank on.
- Latency claims are vendor claims. Nothing on this page is an independent latency measurement, and it is not labelled as one.
- Prices move. If a figure here is stale or wrong, it is wrong — check the source link before you buy.
- Disclosure: this page links to Top Tier Newswire as part of a marketing campaign for that product. The pricing above is other vendors' published pricing and is reported as found.
No affiliate links. No prices estimated. Last verified 13 August 2026.
