Paid vendor reports versus our free daily update — the citation and the mindshare are ours. What you pay for is depth: per-bond spread series, attribution detail, automated delivery. We never sell raw trade records — the paid tiers deliver SpreadBench's own derived products only.
The historical rule of the data business: the money is in relicensing, not retail subscriptions. NCSX institutional licences come in three tiers by depth of use, all carrying attribution (index code + methodology version + DOI). Licences activate with licensed data in v0.2.0; sign during the seed phase to lock terms and get a first-year discount.
Final pricing depends on data costs and delivery scope once the TRACE Vendor Agreement is in place (see the cost-transparency table below); framework agreements signed in the seed phase lock the terms. No licence includes resale of raw TRACE trade records.
The cost of running an index is mostly data licensing. We publish this table so anyone citing the benchmark knows its compliance basis, and why it can stay free. This is an unsigned cost model (same version as methodology §7); final vendor quotes govern.
| Cost item | Amount | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Historic licence | $2,000 setup + $2,000 / year | Historic files, six-month lag, includes 144A |
| Redistribution fee | ≤ $1,000 / year | $1 per CUSIP per year, capped at $1,000 |
| First-year total | ≈ $5,000 / year | $2,000 setup + $2,000 annual + $1,000 redistribution cap; same version as methodology §7 |
| End-of-Day (daily phase) | $9,000 / year | $750/month, T+1 end-of-day files — the primary source once daily updates go live |
| Real-time feed | $18,000 / year | $1,500/month; licence explicitly includes index redistribution rights |
Yes. T+1 aggregate levels are free permanently — that is the product's positioning, not a promotion. A free daily update is our core substitute for paid vendor reports. What we charge for is depth (full history, per-bond series) and automation.
Publishing derived index values counts as redistribution, which requires a Vendor Agreement and fees — we have rebuilt the cost model from published rates (unsigned; see the table above and methodology §7). v0.1.x is a seed series; if TRACE policy tightens, fallback sources (exchange-listed bonds, trade prints in public research) are already specified.
Different convention: we take all trades of the day weighted by face value into a sector aggregate, while terminals mostly show single-bond quotes or model valuations. At the single-bond level the two should be close (constituent TRACE activity supports daily updates); at the sector level there is no comparable object — which is exactly why SpreadBench exists.
Rating is a licensed business. SpreadBench aggregates public secondary trades and does factual arithmetic (“spreads computed from public trades”); it never says buy or sell. That is not caution for its own sake — it is what lets the benchmark be cited as widely as possible.
The free tier is T+1 and unsuitable for intraday decisions. Its use is monitoring and pricing input: risk thresholds, post-investment monitoring, research citations, model features. For real-time needs, talk to us about Enterprise.
The methodology is fully public and the methodology page ships a live recompute tool — feed in the same constituents and benchmark and the output must match the published value exactly. Every value traces back to specific TRACE trades.