It's not just the prices, its the quality.
You pay unbelievable sums to TR/Refinitiv/whatever they are called now and they ship you a HD/point you at an S3 bucket which contains a mix of valid/incomplete/corrupt/blank files which you then spend months checking. Oops, here's a new bucket for that. Oh oops, sorry again, we just found those files. Ooops, our parser had an error try again!
BMLL seems to be trying to disrupt this space, wishing them well.
I am actually on the direct consumer side, but I feel for you. Occasionally we'll take intermediate data though from third parties, and good god the quality is atrocious.
This is especially true for datasets that don't have a single authoritative source, like corporate calendar actions, where you have to consume data from 3-4 vendors and reconcile for a 'shared consensus' on simple shit like..."When is a company going to release quarterly earnings?"
I'm ever grateful that I do not work in asset classes that are not centrally traded and centrally cleared. I recognize there's more money to be made in the uncertainty, but holy crap it drives me insane.
Of the many things I despise in the industry, market data and connectivity costs are near the top. It’s a fully captured market, and customers don’t have a choice when the producer decides to raise prices.