Redistribution needs a commercial license. An individual subscription covers your own use, so the moment data reaches someone else, whether that is a customer of your product, a reader of a published chart, or another business, it is redistribution and the individual plan does not cover it. The exchanges license it that way, and Massive is bound by their terms as a vendor.
Applies to
- Plans: the commercial plans on massive.com/business. Several are sold self-serve; enterprise agreements and futures business licenses go through sales.
- Endpoints: all of them. This is a licensing question rather than a technical one, so nothing in the API behaves differently.
- Asset classes: all.
What counts as redistribution
What counts as redistribution comes down to whether anybody other than you sees the data:
| Almost certainly redistribution | Usually not |
|---|---|
| Showing prices to users of your app or website | Your own trading or research |
| Publishing charts or tables built from the data | A private model whose outputs you keep |
| Passing data to a client, supplier or partner | A backtest nobody else sees |
| Reselling the data, in any form | Internal analysis within your own use |
Derived values sit in between. A signal computed from the data may or may not be redistribution depending on how much of the underlying price it reveals, and that is a conversation rather than a rule you can apply from an article.
How to arrange it
- Look at massive.com/business. The Stocks, Options and Currencies Business plans are sold there with a checkout button.
- If your case is not on that page, email sales@massive.com describing what you are building and who will see the data. That description is what sizes the license.
- If you are an early-stage company, say so. Qualifying startups can get 25 percent or more off their first year.
Tell us the shape of it honestly even if you are unsure whether it qualifies. Getting it wrong is worse than asking: exchanges audit redistribution.
Why the exchanges care
The exchanges care because their revenue depends on knowing how many people ultimately see their data. A vendor license covers the vendor's own customers, and every further hop has to be accounted for, which is why the license terms follow the data rather than stopping at the first buyer. That is also why the price of a commercial plan is a licensing cost rather than a difference in what you receive.
If you see an error
Nothing in the API refuses a request because of your license, so a refusal is about your subscription rather than your rights.
If you have already built something that redistributes on an individual plan, tell us. Moving to the right license is routine; being found in an audit is not.
