The alt-data market, counted.

Where the supply is

The register holds 361 providers across 20 categories. Supply is far from even. News & Sentiment is the deepest chapter, with 40 providers; Auto & Vehicle Data is the thinnest, with 3. For a buyer, the long bars are where you have negotiating leverage and real choice; the short bars are where a handful of firms hold the field.

The pricing fog

The single most striking number is what the market will not tell you. 46% of the providers we track (166 of 361) publish no discernible price at all — no band, no range, no list. Of those that do signal a price, 104 sit at the enterprise tier, 48 in the middle, and 9 at a startup-friendly entry point. Against all of them, 34 providers are free or open. Price opacity is not incidental; it is the working condition of the market.

The vintage curve

Alternative data felt new for a long time, but the supply side is no longer young. Among the 206 providers whose founding year we know, the median vintage is 2013. The clear wave crested between 2010 and 2014 — 79 firms — and has thinned since: only 7 of the firms we track were founded in 2020 or later. The category is consolidating around incumbents rather than minting new entrants.

The geography of supply

Alternative data is overwhelmingly an American business. Of the 358 providers whose home base or primary coverage we record, 198 are anchored in the US — more than half the register. A further 73 operate globally rather than from one market, and the UK is the largest single national base after the US with 27. For a buyer outside North America, the practical read is that local-market coverage is the scarce commodity.

How it is delivered

On delivery, the market has standardised. The API is the default mechanism by a wide margin (182 providers offer it), followed by dashboards and feeds. Bulk and S3 hand-offs remain an enterprise minority. A buyer planning integration can assume an API exists and treat anything else as the exception to confirm.

The consolidation ledger

A directory is only as honest as the firms it removes. We track decay: 61 providers have been acquired, folded into a parent, or had their sites go dark since we began. Each is recorded with the reason and the date the status was confirmed. This is the part of the market the paid guides rarely show — not who is selling, but who has stopped.

How we check: each status is confirmed from outside, not asserted by us. “No longer resolves in public DNS” means the provider's own domain returns no record from the public resolvers (Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 and Google 8.8.8.8) on the date shown — the company's site is gone, not a loading error on our end. Acquisitions and mergers are confirmed against public announcements.