from Hacker News

Tiingo – Pay-what-you-want “high-end” financial tools

by brbcoding on 12/19/15, 7:10 AM with 34 comments

• by jeremyt on 12/20/15, 12:01 AM

  I have very mixed feelings about this.

  This seems like a very weird pricing strategy on the one hand and a very weird charitable strategy on the other.

  Frankly, the last thing poor people need is free access to high-end stock trading tools so they can piss away their money on losers and transaction fees.

  This seems about the same as offering poor people free rides to the gas station so they can buy a lottery ticket. I mean, you're giving them a free ride, but to what end?

• by Abundance on 12/20/15, 12:35 AM

  I admire the intentions and the hard work behind this however...

  The issue I have with pay-what-you-want or low revenue business models is they're unsustainable.

  Either declare something a passion/charity project and make it complete free (but perhaps open to receiving donations) to properly set users' expectations or monetize it.

  I takes a lot of time to develop and maintain complex technology like trading tools.

  I don't know what the founder's background is. However, if he makes good money from other sources, after the initial euphoria of sharing his tools with the world goes away, he'll have stay motivated doing the grunt work to maintain it. And pay out of pocket for expenses and the value of his own time a PWYC pricing model likely won't cover.

  Making money (and a profit) isn't evil or bad, it's necessary both to see if your market (and audience) deems your product worth developing and to keep yourself motivated (and compensated fairly enough) to work on something.

  A lot of companies have shut down due to lack of funds (or the ability of makers to go without making much money). It's risky for an user to try a product with a tenuous future, come to base their work flow on it only for it to be closed down down the road. Especially with something like trading.

• by voisin on 12/20/15, 3:32 AM

  What's the data source for the fundamental data and how reliable is it (considering it is free)?

• by BrooklynRage on 12/20/15, 1:52 AM

  This is super cool. I've played with Bloomberg terminals a few times at hackathons & job fairs, and this has a very similar feel.

• by cschmidt on 12/20/15, 12:30 AM

  Isn't tingo.com going to send you a cease and desist at some point? Seems like you need a new name.

• by logn on 12/20/15, 5:05 AM

  On pay-what-you-want pricing, can you deduct that from income if you're a business? Might be better to have business pricing, personal pricing, and demo/free pricing, and just rely on an honor system for people to select which bucket applies to them. But if you only expect people to pay a small amount, then I doubt tax deductions are much of a concern.

• by TaylorSwift on 12/20/15, 3:51 PM

  For these fields: http://imgur.com/EPCL65s

  Having a link to those numbers as supporting backup would be convenient, such as the 10-K.

  I think it is nice to have a quick confirmation, as well as reading other information that the quote provides (footnotes, prospectus, 8-K)

• by intenscia on 12/20/15, 1:59 PM

  Quite like this idea. Whilst this kind of information maybe dangerous, I like the fact that anyone can access it

• by infinite8s on 12/21/15, 11:11 PM

  Given the pay what you want, pricing how will you prevent hedge funds and such from utilizing your data?

• by pbreit on 12/20/15, 9:59 PM

  "high end" and "pay what you want" don't ordinarily go together.