You're just making allegations. It says in the contract that the subscription price is based upon how many subscribers subscribe to the service (they need to cover their costs of implementing 24/7 support and a help desk). It probably isn't public, but Google-fu turns up some older information:

http://contracts.onecle.com/edgar-online/trw.svc.1998.09.11....

    A.   Broadcast Service Subscription Charge
    This charge will be set on October 1, 1998 based on the number of signed
    contracts received by that date. The table below contains a 14-month price at
    various subscription levels:

    SUBSCRIBERS AS OF
    OCTOBER 1, 1998                PRICE
                          
    1 to 8                        $152,172
    9 to 15                         92,967
    16 to 25                        55,346
    25+                             42,179

This table strongly suggests that there's something like a "slice of pie" pricing scheme in the government's contract with the service provider. That's a very common arrangement where the per-subscriber pricing is very high for few subscribers and drops as more are added.

At the limit, the slice of pie pricing is completely continuous and each incremental subscriber lowers the cost for everyone. This one may be coarser grained.

Nothing inherently shady or anticompetitive about such a scheme. It also tends to arise where governments (like SEC, or like county clerk offices) have a dual mission of providing public access while offsetting costs, and need/want to outsource it to a for profit service provider.

$150,000 = you are paying for early access to insider data. You are NOT paying for a fucking help desk at that price.

Edit: downvoting does not change this fact either.

According to the WSJ article on this, the current price is around $1500 per month. [1]

Also, note that you are paying to receive an electronic feed of a company's public SEC filings, which include filings detailing purchase and sale of stock by the company's employees, which are called "insiders" in this context.

The phrase "insider data" conjures images of insider trading, which relies on trading on material non-public information, and something quite different.

[1] http://online.wsj.com/articles/fast-traders-are-getting-data... (paywall, Google the title to bypass)

you are being downvoted for picking a number out of context and unnecessarily provocative language.

"It makes much more sense (both economically and technically) that they simply crippled the free feed. Especially since it is provided by a private third party who makes bank on the people who purchase the premium edition." Not sure this makes sense at all - if the push version is better half the time, that means the other half the time the free or non-push version is better. Since "better" is a matter of seconds here, it could be something as simple as "half the time, push notifications go out before the site finishes replicating".

The SEC website explicitly states: "The subscription price is set annually by Attain, LLC, using a weighted average methodology based on the number of primary feeds for subscribers at the beginning of the each year. Subscriber organizations can be invoiced annually or monthly."

There are two very detailed documents on the linked website that have both business and technical details along with specifications for the service.

There is nothing shady going on here.

No published prices + a seemingly HIGHLY profitable portion of a government service provided by a private company = something pretty shady.

Even the contracts to run private prisons don't give this much opportunity to gouge.

Were this service run on an at-cost basis would maybe cost $80 or so per month. $200 at most.

"HIGHLY profitable"? Even at the highest price quoted on this thread, this looks like a rounding error --- in the sense that if you were a startup providing this information at these prices to its total addressable market, you'd have a hard time even getting funded.

The number of firms that can profit from trading off realtime access to fundamentals is not large. It's a market where viable real products need to have customer lifetime values in the many millions.