And its not just Planet that is hung-up on this same failed business model. Its also Hexagon, and a myriad of other earth-observation providers. Some are so difficult to work with its literally cheaper to go buy an airplane and a wide format camera and roll your own.
There’s a new one like every picosecond.” It’s “delivery, but for dorm rooms” for space tech.
Bloomberg comes to mind since they offer wholesale access to data in addition to all the terminal functions.
(1) is a desktop (and now mobile) application that trader, sales, etc. use to communicate, view raw data, and view derived data in "mini-apps" (price this bond under scenario X, etc.) The base cost is about 25K USD per year (there are local IT costs above the terminal license fees). There is a raw data access API for Excel, but very limited. They block your API access if you try to download too much data. The days of pricing any kind of volume of products from a Excel Bloomberg API is mostly gone. Also, you cannot run it on a server and just screen scrape / use data API all day long.
(2) is a raw data feed service, akin to Reuters. Not well understood by industry outsiders: There is no "all you can eat data service" anywhere in finance. Period. Every primary data source is now carefully guarded with license costs and special rules (no redist, etc.). Some stock exchanges make more money selling data licenses than collection trading fees! I have no idea about BPIPE prices, but I assume expensive and per data source with nearly infinite granularity.
About revenue: (1) Wiki says: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_Terminal
If you believe it: 20K USD per terminal and ~325,000 terminals as of 2016. That is 6.5 billion USD per year. Nice.
About revenue: (2) No idea. I cannot find any reliable published stats.
Lastly: I regularly see people argue on HN about an open source version of Bloomberg. It is impossible for two reasons: (a) Network effect in the communication channels -- lots of people mostly use Bloomberg chat / email and hardly use data, besides the trivial. Most people on the buy side (money management, hedge funds, portfolio managers) join Bloomberg to talk to other people on Bloomberg. And: (b) data licensing.
I've heard so many founders try to describe their business as "Bloomberg for.." when trying to describe a mixed focus offering of products that I immediately hear alarm bells nowadays.
Disclaimer: never actually used their system, just saw presentations about it, which show how one can train an algorithm to count... stuff.
What we are trying to do is indeed allow customers to build algorithms tailored to their use cases. We often joke that the reason our ML works is because we are overfitting to customer datasets/use cases. But I think that's somewhat true in the sense that we are not going for "worldwide trees counting" but more for "reliably count cars on these 50 parcels".
It's also interesting to note that a sizeable chunk of our revenue is coming from companies with drone data where it makes even more sense to be specific to customer data (resolution, time of day, geo, etc...).
You don't always have to order the biggie fries and drink, you can just order the standard meal.
The OPs point is that it won’t be profitable/effective, that’s all.
* Just sell data or;
* Just sell applications powered by your proprietary source of data
Do not:
* Sell derived/refined data as a half-measure
* Sell both applications and wholesale data at the same time
If you feel like that doesn't make sense, you are not alone. Almost everyone in the industry disagrees with my views on this topic based on how they run their businesses. Satellogic is one notable exception. But I can't think of a single other provider that would agree with me.