IEX Cloud

IEX Cloud (built by the famous Investors Exchange - IEX, the heroes of Michael Lewis's book *Flash Boys*) is a highly disruptive, incredibly powerful API platform that completely revolutionized how financial data is priced and consumed. IEX realized that financial data pricing was notoriously opaque and predatory. They launched IEX Cloud with a brilliantly transparent, "Pay-As-You-Go" credit system, making institutional-grade data accessible to anyone. The core differentiator of IEX Cloud is its "Message-Based Pricing and Core IEX Market Data." A developer buys "credits." Pinging the API for a live stock price costs 1 credit. Pinging it for a complex historical balance sheet costs 10 credits. You only pay for exactly what you consume. Furthermore, because IEX is an actual registered US Stock Exchange, they provide completely free, unlimited, real-time access to the trading volume occurring directly on their own exchange. Beyond market pricing, IEX Cloud has aggressively expanded its datasets to include alternative data. A developer can hit the API to get corporate ESG scores, CEO compensation data, institutional ownership percentages, and even live sentiment analysis on specific stocks from Twitter/News feeds. For FinTech startups and agile development teams who want institutional data without signing 3-year, $50,000 contracts, IEX Cloud is phenomenally disruptive.