hyperfeedvs. alternatives
Comparison · updated monthly

You already have six alt-data vendors.
You don't have typed events.

Most teams hack together three or four tools: a news wire, a filings parser, a scraper, a LLM classifier. It kinda works — until it doesn't. Hyperfeed replaces the stack with one normalized event stream, source-cited and schema-versioned.

Alt-data vendors

Six contracts. Six schemas. Six invoices.

  • ×Every feed has its own schema, own auth, own delivery mechanism
  • ×Separate negotiations for every dataset — legal-review hell on every add
  • ×No cross-family joins — layoffs and WARN notices live in different DBs
  • ×Historical backfill is a separate SKU on most vendors
  • ×Pricing is per-dataset, not per-user — costs compound as you add signal sources
  • ×Each vendor has different SLAs, different data lineage, different support
Hyperfeed

Typed events. Sourced. Dedup'd. Replayable.

  • One schema, one auth, one stream — all 8 families share the envelope
  • One contract, one DPA, one invoice — add families without re-negotiating
  • Cross-family joins via shared entity_id and event_id graph
  • Full history included in every tier from Developer up — no backfill SKU
  • Flat tier pricing — unit economics don’t explode as you add signals
  • Single SLA across families — uniform 99.95% on Pro, 99.99% on Institutional
Feature by feature

Where the gap shows up.

Every row below is a question your platform team will ask. Our answer in blue; the alternative in gray. No fine print.

QuestionHyperfeedAlt-data vendors
How many contracts to cover 8 event families?legal-review cost in onboarding16–10 separate MSAs
Schema harmonizationfields that mean the same thing across datasetsUnified envelope · one entity graphDifferent for each vendor
Cross-family join (layoffs × regulator action)e.g. find all companies with both, in 30 daysOne SQL query · same tablesPython glue across 3 APIs · good luck
Historical backfillwhen you need to backtestIncluded · 10 years on ProPer-dataset license · usually 30–50% extra
Pricing shapehow your bill scalesFlat tier · predictableSum of per-dataset seats · unpredictable
Point-in-time correctnessno lookahead when backtesting?as_of=2024-01-15Often missing — lookahead common
Adding a new event family mid-contracthow fastAPI flip — same keyNew MSA · procurement loop · 4–8 weeks
Supportwhen something breaksOne Slack channel · one on-call teamDifferent desk per vendor
Same story. Two responses.

The same FDA rejection. Theirs vs ours.

Monday, 4:47pm ET. ALDX receives a Complete Response Letter for reproxalap. Here's what hits your systems from each API.

Alt-data vendors3 APIs · diff schemas · no join
GET/api/v2/news?symbol=ALDX
// Three separate API calls. Three different schemas.

// 1. pharma_alerts (Vendor A)
{ "alert_id": "pa_882341", "type": "fda_crl",
  "company": "Aldeyra Therapeutics", "drug": "reproxalap" }

// 2. regulatory_feed (Vendor B)
{ "record": "reg_aldx_0413", "agency": "fda",
  "ticker": "ALDX", "letter_type": "complete_response" }

// 3. corp_events (Vendor C)
{ "uid": "ce_7x2k", "category": "regulatory_decision",
  "issuer_cik": "0001341235", "description": "FDA issued CRL..." }

// Now you dedupe, join by whatever fuzzy match you can build,
// and pray all three vendors stay up.
Hyperfeed→ emitted at +68s, typed
GET/v1/events?ticker=ALDX
{
  "event_id": "evt_20260413_aldx_fda_crl",
  "event_type": "fda_approval_declined",
  "family": "regulatory",
  "assertion_type": "fact",
  "entity": {
    "entity_id": "ent_aldx",
    "ticker": "ALDX",
    "cik": "0001341235",
    "lei": "529900W0O7QKGDLPGW09"
  },
  "payload": {
    "regulator": "FDA",
    "product_id": "reproxalap",
    "action": "complete_response_letter"
  },
  "related_events": [
    "evt_20260413_aldx_8k_item801",
    "evt_20260413_aldx_conf_call_scheduled"
  ]

  // joined to the 8-K filing automatically
  // joined to the scheduled conference call
  // canonical entity_id links everything
}
Why teams switch

Three reasons, in their own words.

01 · dedup

We stopped burning engineers on duplicates.

News APIs emit the same story from six outlets as six separate records. Every consumer team writes their own dedup logic. Hyperfeed merges on entity + event_type + effective_at and attaches all sources as evidence. One event, many sources.

Before:4 engineers, a Redis dedup cache, a weekly "why did we alert three times" postmortem.

After: event_id is the only key we need.
02 · assertion_type

Allegations aren't the same as facts.

News wires flatten "WSJ reports" and "company confirms" into one severity level. That's fine for humans. It's a disaster for auto-execution. Hyperfeed tags every event with assertion_type allegation, trusted_report, fact.

Our risk team filters allegation to human review, auto-routes factto systems. We couldn't do that with a news wire.
03 · lifecycle

Stories change. Your database should too.

An FDA rejection reported at 4:47pm becomes "official_announced" at 5:03 when the company files its 8-K. Hyperfeed represents this as one event with status transitions. A news wire represents it as two unrelated stories with different URLs.

Every event has a lifecycle object: detected_at, announced_at, effective_at, confirmed_at, refuted_at. You can replay any event from any point in time.
Heard from a head of data
“We were paying six vendors for the same data at six different latencies. We replaced five of them with Hyperfeed.”
Head of Market Data, L/S equity fund · $4B AUM
Migration · 3 steps

Swap in. Dual-run. Cut over.

We don't ask you to rip out your existing pipeline on day one. Most teams dual-run for two weeks, then cut traffic when they've validated the schema against their own backtests.

STEP 01 · week 1

Subscribe to the family you need.

Pick a single event family — usually regulatory or leadership. Point a webhook at your queue. Done.

POST /v1/subscriptions
{ "family": "regulatory",
  "webhook_url": "https://you.co/hook",
  "assertion_types": ["fact","trusted_report"] }
STEP 02 · week 2

Dual-run and diff.

We ship a difftool that runs against your existing pipeline's output and highlights where hyperfeed caught events sooner, merged duplicates, or classified differently.

hf diff \
  --their-export their_feed.jsonl \
  --date-range 2026-03-01:2026-03-31
> 142 events - hyperfeed earlier
> 38 duplicates collapsed
> 7 class conflicts
STEP 03 · week 3+

Cut over. Keep the old feed as backup.

Flip your primary. Most teams keep the legacy feed on standby for 30 days. After that, the vendor contract lapses. Most teams find Hyperfeed replaces 2–3 existing tools at a fraction of the combined cost.

hf subscribe \
  --families all \
  --deliver kafka://your-cluster/events \
  --replay-from 2026-01-01
> 14,207 historical events backfilled
See the difference yourself

Stop parsing headlines. Start reading events.

See the diff yourself. The 7-day delayed feed shows the same events your current vendor misses. Compare side-by-side, no meeting required.