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[gm10]

Originally Posted by Ted Craven

Perhaps I misunderstand the type of data being referred to as costing thousand per month, for use in either high-end or entry level software efforts.

My RDSS software users pay (at most) $165/month for everything (PP and Result Chart data) - and cheaper longer-term pricing. If I'm not mistaken, most HDW monthly data packages cost less than that.

When I was developing my software, Equibase (TrackMaster) made unlimited current and historical data available to me at no charge (because they would get a future cut of data sales). Even the one-off, home-brew, non-commercial developer gets everything for about $1650 a year (probably less depending on data source).

Tote data is free and several ADW's APIs are available to gather it. Or use ATRPro.

The issues lie with a dearth of competent programmer/horseplayers, the size of the market and desire to mount a commercial operation (i.e. including customer and tech support and marketing). For personal power users, I would have thought that comprehensive apps like HTR provide enough public and proprietary data to spend years datamining.

I would say that my glass is (at least) half-full. Then again, I'm an optimist.

Ted

Don't Equibase charge a monthly fee of several thousands on top of a sales cut?