New whitepaper series details the full costs of building and maintaining real-time market data infrastructure
New York, London, Paris, St. Louis – September 24th, 2025 – Exegy, a leading provider of market data, trading technology and managed services for the capital markets, today launched a new whitepaper series quantifying the true cost of real-time market data infrastructure. Drawing on benchmarks from current and former executives at Tier 1 banks and hedge funds within their elite client community, Exegy details the full costs, time-to-market, and staffing required to build and maintain systems to process and distribute real-time market data from direct exchange feeds.
Part 1 focuses on software-based implementations and reveals that building and maintaining in-house systems is significantly more expensive, slower, and more burdensome than leveraging vendor-managed solutions.
Key Findings:
- Cost to Build: Developing a single software feed handler and supporting infrastructure in-house can cost up to ~$1.8M. Full US equities coverage (20 markets) exceeds $4.7M, more than 8x the cost of Exegy’s software solution
- Time to Market: In-house teams take ~3.5 years to achieve necessary market coverage, compared to just 4 to 6 months for integration and deployment with Exegy – a 7x reduction in time to market
- Maintenance cost: Annual in-house software maintenance costs exceed $3.5M, while Exegy’s fully managed solution reduces these recurring expenses by more than 2.5x
Firms often struggle to gain a comprehensive view of the total build and maintenance costs of these complex systems, as they are often obscured by divisions of staff and budget within large, sophisticated trading firms. This impairs their ability to make decisions on how to value expert partners, where to engage with them, and further prevents them from liberating resources to focus on projects that can deliver differentiated performance for their businesses.
“We initiated our rigorous analysis to better understand and communicate our value. The data greatly enhances our ability to serve as a trusted partner to our clients and engage in meaningful conversations about optimizing the performance and cost structure of their businesses,” said David Taylor, CEO of Exegy. “For example, the finding of lower maintenance costs debunks the commonly held view that firms will reap savings over time after investing in an expensive and time-consuming build effort. It provides quantitative support for partnering with us to get to market faster and to focus their time and resources on proprietary innovation.”
Taylor added, “It was also past time for the industry to move beyond hand waving about ‘build versus buy’ to real conversations with real numbers.”
Part 1 is available now at exegy.com. Part 2, which focuses on FPGA-based infrastructure, will follow later in 2025. Key findings will also be presented at Exegy’s upcoming Client Summit in New York on October 1.
