A Bloomberg Terminal subscription costs roughly $24,000 per user per year (the price has been roughly flat since the early 2000s). It is the institutional default for market data, news, fundamentals, derivative analytics and chat. Arithmos costs a fraction of that and overlaps with a small slice of Bloomberg's surface — the index-construction and backtesting workflow.
| Capability | Bloomberg Terminal | Arithmos |
|---|---|---|
| Real-time tick data | Yes — institutional grade | No — end-of-day prices |
| Fixed-income analytics (YAS, BVAL, OAS) | Yes — depth no one else matches | No |
| Derivatives / OVML | Yes | No |
| Equity index backtest (PORT, BBI) | Yes — comprehensive | Yes — first-class for the equity slice |
| Plain-English index construction (LLM) | Limited | Yes — the core feature |
| Holdings export to a retail broker | No (not the use case) | Yes — CSV / Trading 212 / Fidelity |
| Bloomberg Chat / IB | Yes — the killer feature | No |
| Annual cost (single user) | ≈ $24,000 | Plus: ≈ $20/mo · Pro: ≈ $90/mo |
What you can do on Arithmos that Bloomberg makes harder
- Build a 50-stock thematic index from a one-sentence prompt — Bloomberg PORT requires you to define the universe and rule yourself.
- Share an index publicly via URL — Bloomberg outputs aren't natively shareable outside the Terminal.
- Export to a retail brokerage as a single basket trade.
- Browse community-built indices for ideas.
FAQ
What's the actual cost of a Bloomberg Terminal in 2026?
Bloomberg's published list price is around $24,000 per terminal per year for a single user, with multi-terminal discounts. Arithmos's Pro tier is roughly two orders of magnitude lower because we don't carry the cost of news, chat or institutional-grade tick data.
Does Arithmos use Bloomberg data?
No. Arithmos pulls market data from Yahoo Finance, Financial Modeling Prep, Tiingo, Polygon, Alpha Vantage, Stooq and a few other public market-data APIs — not Bloomberg's licensed feeds.
