For my own personal usage, I have built an add-in for Excel that automatically imports financial statement data (balance sheet, income statement, cash flow statement line items) of public companies from a large investor service’s website into a spreadsheet. The add-in replaces manually browsing the website and either copy-pasting the data I need or downloading a CSV file and importing it to Excel for using a VLOOKUP.
As some of you may know, there are data vendors out there who offer this already: deliver data either via Excel add-in and/or via API for Python and the like. S&P CapitalIQ and FactSet come to my mind, which are designed for the finance professional, also Morningstar and what I call "discount data vendors" like Calcbench or Intrinio. All of them are either outrageously expensive or cover US companies only (due to them crawling electronic SEC filings), and still cost a fair amount of cash. So, I wondered, can’t I sell my add-in for a very affordable price to the public?
However, I expect the company operating the website the add-in uses won’t be happy. They, too, sell a subscription including an Excel add-in for a (very high) fee. However, I can’t see me violating any part of their terms of use:
Subject to the terms of this Agreement, XYZ grants you a revocable, non-transferable, non-exclusive limited license to use those portions of the Service, to which you are granted access but only for your own personal, noncommercial use and not for any use on behalf of any third party. For absence of doubt, you may not use the Service to service, or otherwise perform work on behalf of, any brokerage, financial services or related person(s) or their clients.
Also,
[…] you may not modify, copy, distribute, disclose, retransmit, sell, publish, broadcast, or circulate the Service, or any portion of it (including, but not limited to, any download or printed copies made from it) without XYZ’s prior written consent.
As I see it, I am not (re-)selling any of their data, but basically selling a piece of code. Once the customer employs my add-in, his computer downloads the data directly from their website without my interference or redirection. I intend to be completely transparent to the customer as to where the data really comes from. Of course, what my customer uses the add-in for (non-commercial or commercial uses), I have no control over and can’t be held accountable for – right?? Also, as my customer pulls the data from the website and not me, I am technically not even party to the user agreement, or am I?
Am I being too naïve? Can I expect trouble? Should I get a lawyer to look into this? Also, what ways of promotion can you think of? Getting financial data into Excel is an occasionally researched problem on quora.com etc., so I figured I could post answers including (among other things) a link to my (future) website. Any other ideas?
Thanks!