Many alternative data providers have increased their prices in recent years, likely driven by higher data sourcing costs for vendors and a growing trend of investor-specific pricing models. In this piece, we highlight a range of cost-effective datasets, offers by vendors that are new to the investment vertical, incumbent providers with lower-cost subsets and even a number of free sources of data.

Note: For this research piece, we define ‘affordable’ as less than or equal to $25k/yr.

In our previous intelligence piece, Alternative data on a budget, we found that nearly 40% of datasets listed on Neudata’s Scout platform met our definition of affordable. As of June 2026, this proportion has dropped significantly to about 31%, with only 4% of reports covering free datasets and around 27% covering datasets that cost less than $25k/yr.