The $100,000 Feed: What Truth Social's New API Says About the Value of News

On August 1, Truth Social plans to start selling something unusual: real-time, licensed access to the posts of its most-followed accounts, delivered through a product it calls the "Truth API." The target customer is explicit. According to reporting by the Financial Times, the company is weighing a price of up to $100,000 a month, and the pitch is aimed squarely at financial firms that trade on speed, where a few milliseconds of head start on a market-moving headline can be worth the fee.

We don't have a strong opinion on the politics here, and the conflict-of-interest questions the launch has raised are well covered elsewhere. What interests us is simpler and more useful if you build anything that reacts to the market: someone just put a public price on the value of news latency. It's worth understanding what that number actually represents, and what it doesn't.

The price is not about one account. It's about the delay.

Selling data to financial firms is not new. Exchanges do it. Social platforms do it. Newswires have done it for over a century. The reason those feeds command a premium has never really been the content in isolation. It's the combination of three things:

• Latency — how fast you receive an event after it happens.
• Access — whether you get it before, or at the same time as, everyone else.
• Structure — whether it arrives as clean, machine-readable data or as text you still have to parse.

A six-figure monthly price for a single stream is the market saying those three things, bundled together, are worth a lot to the firms that can turn them into trades in milliseconds. That's a real signal. It's also a narrow one.

What a single premium feed doesn't give you

Markets don't move on one account. They move on tariffs, central bank language, earnings surprises, supply-chain disruptions, a regulator's filing, a post on a different platform entirely. A firm that pays for one privileged stream has bought a fast look at one input. It hasn't bought coverage.

The durable edge in news isn't owning the single loudest source. It's seeing the whole field, fast, in a form you can act on. That's a harder engineering problem than paying an invoice, which is exactly why most teams don't want to build it from scratch.

Where finlight fits

finlight exists to make that whole-field view accessible without a high-frequency trading budget. It delivers structured, enriched, real-time financial news from thousands of sources through a single API, so a small team can build the kind of news-reactive system that used to require a market-data department.

Concretely, the same three levers that make a premium feed valuable are the ones we focus on:

• Latency. Our raw WebSocket stream delivers each article the moment it's ingested, before any enrichment, so latency-sensitive systems react immediately.

  Powered by: raw WebSocket streaming.

• Access across sources. Instead of one account, you subscribe to the market. Filter by ticker, country, or category, in nine languages, and see the story wherever it breaks.

  Powered by: WebSocket, ticker and country filters, multilingual coverage.

• Structure. Every enriched article arrives already scored for sentiment and tagged with the companies involved, resolved to real tickers and ISINs. You spend your time on the signal, not on parsing HTML.

  Powered by: sentiment, company entities, query language.

The honest version

We're not going to tell you that news alone is a trading strategy. It isn't, and we've written before about how much work sits between a headline and a good decision. What the Truth API launch makes unusually clear is the part that is true: fast, structured access to market-moving news has a real, quantifiable value, and the firms that treat it as infrastructure have understood that for a long time.

The interesting question the $100,000 number raises isn't whether news is worth paying for. It's whether that value should be locked behind a single premium feed, or available to any team that wants to build with it. We're firmly on the second side of that.

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