The platform quote arrives, the founder builds a spreadsheet, and the market data line reads zero. That line is almost never zero. It is one of the two or three costs that reliably surprise a first-time prop firm, because the platform vendor quotes the platform, the liquidity provider quotes the liquidity, and the prices that fill your charts turn out to belong to a third conversation nobody flagged.
This is worth working through before you sign anything, not because the amounts are always large, but because the structure of the bill is unfamiliar. Market data is not priced like software. It is priced by who looks at it, on what device, for what purpose, and under whose contract.
Why data is a separate contract at all
Prices come from somewhere. For forex and metals, from liquidity providers and aggregators. For indices, energy and anything with an exchange behind it, from the venue that owns the data, redistributed through a vendor. The venue treats that data as a product, licenses it, and audits the licensing. Your platform is a display surface for it, which is why a platform licence and a data licence are separate documents even when one company sells you both.
That separation is the reason a founder can complete a full platform procurement, get a working environment, and only then discover the charts are empty until an unrelated agreement is executed. The general shape of the market is set out in how market data feeds work; what follows is the part that hits a prop firm specifically.
The lines a first budget usually misses
Four categories account for most of the surprise.
| Cost line | How it is charged | Why a prop firm gets caught |
|---|---|---|
| Per-user display fees | Monthly, per person who can see the prices | Your user count is challenge buyers, which grows with marketing spend rather than with revenue |
| Redistribution licensing | A separate agreement to show a venue's data to third parties | Founders assume the platform's licence covers their traders. It often covers the platform, not your audience |
| Non-display use | Charged where data drives a system rather than a screen | A rules engine reading prices to evaluate drawdown is a system, not a chart |
| Reporting and audits | Monthly user declarations, with true-ups | Someone has to file it every month, and the number is only ever checked when it is wrong |
Add the operational cost underneath: somebody has to hold the vendor relationship, watch for gaps and stale ticks, and answer the trader who says the price on your platform disagreed with the one on their charting site. That is a job, small at first and permanent thereafter.
The demo trap. A prop evaluation is a simulated environment, and founders reasonably assume simulated accounts need no real prices. They do. The whole point of an evaluation is that it reflects live market behaviour, so the data driving it is live data, licensed and billed like live data. Budget as if every challenge account were a live one, because for data purposes it usually is.
What a new firm should actually do about it
Get the data question into the first vendor call rather than the third. Three specifics settle most of it: is a feed included in the quoted price or contracted separately, does the licence cover showing prices to your end traders, and what happens to the cost when your account count doubles. Any vendor selling to prop firms has heard all three and should answer them in a sentence each.
Then check the coverage against the instruments you intend to sell. A firm offering major forex pairs, gold and a couple of index CFDs has a very different data footprint from one offering equities or futures. Founders often widen the instrument list late in the launch because it looks generous on the storefront, then discover the widening moved them into a different licensing bracket. Decide the list early and price it once.
Finally, be careful about cheap sources. Data quality is not an abstraction in this business. A stale tick or a bad spike on a thin instrument can trigger a stop, fail an evaluation and produce a dispute you will lose, because the trader's screenshot will show a candle that did not happen anywhere else. Whatever you save on the feed, you can spend several times over in refunds and reputation.
The bundled alternative, and its limits
The reason eTrader includes a data feed rather than invoicing it is that this line is the one most likely to break a new firm's model. eTrader ships a 70ms-updated feed included free across forex, metals, indices and crypto, with no separate market-data contract to source, negotiate or reconcile, and the platform stays source-agnostic: a firm can plug in its own price sources per instrument when its liquidity strategy calls for it. The reasoning is set out in why the feed is included, and the rest of the cost structure, monthly platform price, setup fee and per-account fee, is published in eTrader pricing.
Bundling is not free of trade-offs and it would be dishonest to present it as one. A firm with strong opinions about a specific venue's data, or one whose institutional clients require a named source, will still want its own contract, and should. Bundled coverage is also defined by the vendor rather than by you, so an instrument outside that coverage is a request rather than a purchase. What bundling buys a first-year prop firm is predictability: a platform bill that does not acquire a second invoice halfway through the launch, which is the same argument made across the whole stack in why legacy platforms cost more.
Whichever route a founder takes, the useful discipline is to treat data as a named line in the model with a cost that moves when the firm grows. Firms that do this find the number manageable. Firms that leave it at zero find it in month three, usually in the same week they are trying to explain a failed evaluation to a trader who is looking at a different price than the one their account was closed on.
"Every founder who tells me their data line is zero is telling me they have not signed the data agreement yet, not that they will not have to."
— Roman Onta, Executive Director, SINGUARD
Key Takeaways
- Market data is licensed separately from the platform because the venue owns the data; a platform licence covers display software, not your audience.
- The missed lines are per-user display fees, redistribution licensing, non-display use for systems like a rules engine, and monthly reporting with true-ups.
- Evaluation accounts are simulated but the prices are not, so budget challenge accounts as if they were live for data purposes.
- eTrader includes a 70ms-updated feed free and stays source-agnostic; a firm needing a specific named venue source will still want its own contract.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do simulated prop evaluation accounts need licensed market data?
In practice yes. An evaluation only means anything if it reflects real market behaviour, so it is driven by live prices, which are licensed and billed as live prices. Treat challenge accounts as live for data budgeting even though no client money is traded.
What is non-display market data and why does it apply to a prop firm?
Non-display covers data consumed by a system rather than shown on a screen. A rules engine reading prices to evaluate drawdown or exposure is a system consuming data, which some licences price differently from a trader looking at a chart.
Is a bundled feed always cheaper than a direct contract?
Not always, and it is not always the right shape. Bundling buys predictability and removes a vendor relationship, but the coverage is defined by the platform vendor. A firm that needs a specific venue as a named source should contract for it directly.
About the Author
Roman Onta is an Executive Director at SINGUARD. He builds the Prop Firm CRM, the Broker CRM, Scalegram and CopySignals side by side with his brother Alex Onta, and he helped on the design of eTrader, the division Alex built and leads. His ground is worldwide payment processing, AML compliance and the corporate structures brokers are built on, work the two of them carry together, shaped by executive roles in the UAE and international corporates. He lives and works in Dubai for most of the year. Meet the executive duo leading Singuard's five divisions.