If anyone other than you can see Massive data in your app, you need a Business subscription. The line is not how much data you use or how many requests you make. It is who sees the data and what it is for: individual plans cover one person's own personal, non-business use, including apps and dashboards you build for yourself, and a Business subscription covers showing the data to anyone else.
Applies to
- Plans: Individual and Business plans, on every asset class.
- Asset classes: stocks, options, indices, futures, forex and crypto.
- Also covers partner datasets such as Benzinga, which have their own Business products.
Where the line sits
Where the line sits is who sees the data: an individual Massive plan is a personal license. It covers you looking at the data yourself, for your own personal, non-business purposes: your own research, your own scripts, your own trading, and apps or dashboards that only you use. It stops the moment the data reaches another person's screen.
A Business subscription is what covers everything else, including all of these:
- A web app, mobile app or dashboard where other people see prices, charts or derived figures
- A private or invite-only product used by anyone besides you, including a handful of pilot testers
- An internal tool that colleagues use
- A staging or demo environment other people can reach
This applies during development, not only at launch. If testers or colleagues can see the data while you are still building, the use case needs a Business subscription from that point. This is the single most common surprise in these conversations.
Derived values are fine within a Business subscription. Calculating a price change or a percentage change from the data and displaying the result is covered by the same plan.
An app only you use
An app or dashboard that only you use, for your own personal, non-business purposes, is covered by an individual plan. The Market Data Terms set two limits, and both apply: the data is licensed for your personal, non-business and non-commercial purposes, and you may not build an application intended for use by end users other than you. So a private screen that shows prices only to you, for your own trading, is covered. The same screen opened to a friend, a tester or a paying member needs a Business subscription, and so does one you use for your job, an employer or a company, including an LLC you trade through: that use makes you a professional subscriber, which individual plans do not cover. See Am I a professional or non-professional subscriber?
Expansions do not change the license
An expansion extends a subscription you already hold, and it inherits that subscription's license. Adding the Financials and Ratios expansion to an individual plan gives you those endpoints for your own personal use; it does not make the plan cover an app other people use, and there is no combination of individual plan plus expansion that adds up to a Business license.
If the use case needs Business, it is the base subscription that has to change.
What to do next
What to do next depends on the product. The Stocks, Options and Currencies Business plans are sold self-serve, the same way as the individual plans; enterprise agreements and futures business licenses go through sales. Pricing and the current tier names live on the pricing page. If you are not sure which plan covers your use case, start at massive.com/contact or email sales@massive.com, and describe it: what you are building, who will see the data, and which asset classes you need. That is enough for them to tell you which product applies and what it costs.
If you see an error
NOT_AUTHORIZED is about the subscription on your account rather than the license you hold, so it is a separate problem. See Why am I not authorized (NOT_AUTHORIZED) when calling Massive's REST API or WebSockets?
An Individual plan keeps returning data in an app other people use, because the API does not check what you do with it. That does not change what the plan covers.
