Compare
PIT next to the products people already pay for
Five of these pages take one vendor each, opening with what that product does better than PIT does, then working through the clock, the corpus and the published price side by side. Most of those products answer "what is the news". PIT answers a different question: "what was knowable at 20:00Z on 9 March 2023", and the two rarely compete. The last two pages compare methods rather than vendors: what a forward-only arena can and cannot measure, next to a replay of a window that has already happened.
Updated 2026-08-27. PIT figures read off a running server; vendor figures off each vendor’s own pages.
The seven pages
Five vendors, and two on method
| Page | Written for | In one sentence |
|---|---|---|
| PIT vs Massive | Someone already paying Massive (formerly Polygon) for the tape | Massive sells trades, quotes and aggregates; PIT answers what was filed and visible at an instant. |
| PIT vs Tiingo | Someone weighing a cheap news archive against a point-in-time cut | Tiingo gives you two article clocks and thirty years of prices. PIT gives you an as-of cut — a read bounded to a past instant — with a coverage certificate recording every day it read. |
| PIT vs Benzinga | Someone using a newswire timestamp as a filing clock | Benzinga originates catalysts in real time; PIT replays the public record on the clock you name. |
| PIT vs NewsAPI | Someone searching for an as-of date financial news API | NewsAPI and Newscatcher filter a web crawl by publication date; an as-of cut is a different operation, and this page shows why. |
| PIT vs RavenPack | Someone comparing self-serve as-of against scored news | RavenPack sells sentiment and event analytics through a sales process; PIT sells rows, clocks and certificates on a card. |
| Forward-only arenas | Someone comparing live trading arenas with replayable evaluation | Secrecy and freshness test only the future; provenance is the one method that can replay 2022 and be checked. |
| Why a forward-only arena cannot backtest | Someone who wants the same point worked through one measured run | An arena’s window starts the day the arena did, so March 2023 has no run to point at; the replay that answers it moves the same strategy from +5.13% to −2.02%. |
Also here
Alternatives, worked examples, definitions
| Page | In one sentence |
|---|---|
| sec-api.io alternative | They index 20 million EDGAR filings and sell the text; we sell the as-of bound and the coverage record. |
| Benzinga News API alternative | Massive already resells Benzinga news, so that is usually where this search should end. |
| Tiingo News alternative | Worth switching when an empty result has to come with a reason attached. |
| Point-in-time SEC filings API | The 8-K worked end to end: which clocks are selectable, what a 409 means, and where the corpus stops. |
| LLM backtest without lookahead | The four ways a filings API leaks the future, with the size of each leak. |
| As-of queries | A row is in the cut when its named clock is at or before as_of, the instant you are asking about. |
| Lookahead bias | Using, at time T, information that was not knowable at T. |
| Coverage certificate | The per-day object that separates a gap in our ingest from a day nobody filed. |
Method
How these pages are written
Prices are each vendor’s own published list prices, with the month they were read attached. RavenPack publishes none, so that page says so instead of reprinting a figure from a roundup. Each of the five vendor pages was written for that one vendor. The two method pages name no vendor price at all, because what they compare is how a contamination control is built.
All five vendors sell news, wires or sentiment. If you are choosing between SEC-filing APIs, the page for that is sec-api.io alternative, and it opens with what they cover that we do not.
Check it
Run a moment against the live playground
Pick an instant and see what the record held at it. Four moments are set up for you: a receivership week, one company number answering FB and then META, an EDGAR acceptance receipt, and the Federal Register public-inspection desk certifying its own days. Every answer comes back with the coverage it rests on. The playground needs no account.
Sample responses carry sample: true. Plans and what the corpus covers are on pricing.
One difference runs under all five vendor pages. A vendor sells you what the record says now; PIT keeps a record of what it said then, and keeps adding to it every fifteen minutes. That is the part a competitor cannot backfill later, and the reason this is a subscription rather than a download. The two method pages are the same fact from the other end: an arena that only runs forward has no way back to March 2023, and a replay does.