Wednesday, August 5, 2026
Choosing the Right finlight Plan
Choosing the Right finlight Plan
The best way to pick a plan is to start from your workload, not the price. finlight's tiers differ along a few clear levers, and once you know which ones your use case leans on, the right plan is usually obvious. This guide maps common workloads to tiers. For exact figures, always check finlight.me/pricing; this post is about how to choose, not the live numbers.
The levers that actually differ
Plans vary mainly along these dimensions:
- Request volume — how many API calls you can make per month.
- History depth — how far back you can query.
- Real-time access — WebSocket streaming and webhooks, and how many connections or deliveries.
- Enrichment — sentiment scores and resolved company entities. These do not unlock together: company entities come in on the entry paid tier, sentiment one tier above that.
- Custom sources — private or customer-specific feeds, on the higher tiers.
When comparing plans, figure out which of these your product depends on most. That is usually the constraint that decides your tier.
Match your workload to a tier
Evaluating or building a side project. Start on Launchpad, the free plan. It gives you the REST API only, with a limited response body: enough to prototype and decide, but without the enriched fields (sentiment and company entities) and without real-time delivery (no webhooks or WebSocket). Those are paid features. Want to try them before committing? Pro Light comes with a 7-day free trial, so you can test enrichment and real-time delivery hands-on before you pay. See the free plan guide.
A production app polling on a schedule. Pro Light is the entry paid tier: more request volume than the free plan, resolved company entities, and basic real-time delivery (a small WebSocket and webhook allowance) if you want to grow into it.
A real-time dashboard or alerting system. Real-time delivery, both webhooks and WebSocket streaming, starts on Pro Light with a monthly pool of delivery credits (dispatches). Pro Standard and up raise that pool and add sentiment and deeper history. Check the pricing page for the exact allowances and size them to your fan-out.
High-volume or low-latency signals. For the highest request volume and the most real-time headroom,
Pro Scale is built for production at scale. And if raw latency is the priority, finlight offers
raw delivery that skips enrichment for maximum speed: a raw WebSocket (wss.finlight.me/raw) and a
raw webhook, both pushing a leaner payload the moment an article is ingested, ahead of the sentiment
and entity data. Raw and enriched draw from the same dispatch pool, so switching to raw buys you
speed, not extra volume. See raw versus enriched WebSockets and
webhooks for the split.
Custom sources, bespoke limits, or compliance needs. That is the Custom (enterprise) plan: custom source onboarding, tailored quotas, and direct support.
A quick way to decide
- Will you stream or get pushed news (WebSocket / webhooks)? If yes, you need a tier that includes real-time delivery.
- How far back do you need to query? Deeper history moves you up the tiers.
- What monthly request volume do you expect at peak? Size to peak, not average.
- Do you need private sources or custom limits? That points to enterprise.
Answer those four and the shortlist is small.
Next steps
- Compare current limits and prices at finlight.me/pricing.
- Not sure you need paid yet? Start with the free plan.
- Questions about fit? Email info@finlight.me or ask in Discord.