Moody's Analytics Pricing 2026 and Orbis Database Price
Moody's Analytics pricing from the published Orbis rate card and 93 US federal awards: Orbis database price per license, plus renewal escalators of 4.5% to 8%.
By the Investables.ai team
August 2026 · 11 min read
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Get the full research cardJump to a question
- How much does Moody's Analytics cost?
- Does Moody's Analytics publish pricing?
- How much does Orbis cost?
- How much do Orbis modules cost?
- How does Orbis module pricing compare with S&P's?
- What do US organizations actually pay for Moody's Analytics?
- Does Moody's Analytics raise prices at renewal?
- What European public bodies pay, and the 30% renewal the US contracts do not show
- How long is a Moody's Analytics contract?
- When is the best time to negotiate with Moody's Analytics?
- Is there a free trial of Moody's Analytics?
- What is Moody's Analytics, and how is it different from Moody's ratings?
- Why is Moody's Analytics so expensive?
- Moody's Analytics vs S&P, FactSet and Bloomberg on price
- How do you negotiate a Moody's Analytics contract down?
- What are the cheaper alternatives to Moody's Analytics?
- The short version
Moody's Analytics is quote-only for almost everything it sells, but one product is an exception: Orbis has a published rate card, filed by Moody's on the UK government's Digital Marketplace, that runs from £98,000 a year for a single named user to £900,000 for up to 100. On the US side, federal contract awards show agencies paying roughly $17,000 a year for a narrow CreditView research subscription up to $4.8 million a year for enterprise credit platforms, with a mid-market band of about $50,000 to $300,000. The same award record shows something no comparison page mentions: Moody's task orders carry fixed annual escalators, and three separate contracts renewed at exactly 4.5%, 5.0% and 8.0%. Every figure below is traced to a primary source and labeled. Gathered August 2026. Educational only, not procurement or investment advice.
How much does Moody's Analytics cost?
Between roughly $17,000 and $4.8 million per year, and the spread is real rather than sloppy reporting. Moody's Analytics is not one product with one price. It is three lines of business selling dozens of separately licensed products, and a single named research subscription and a bank-wide credit decisioning platform are both accurately described as "Moody's Analytics."
Here is what can actually be verified as of August 2026, separated from what is inference.
| Question | Answer | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Is there a published price list? | Yes, for Orbis only | Moody's filing on the UK Digital Marketplace, G-Cloud 14, dated April 2024 |
| Orbis, single named user | £98,000 per year | Same published rate card |
| Orbis, up to 10 named users | £360,000 per year, about £36,000 each | Same published rate card |
| US federal award range | About $17,000 to $4,850,000 per year | USAspending.gov contract award record, 93 awards reviewed |
| Typical US agency subscription | $50,000 to $300,000 per year | Same award record, mid-band |
| Contract length | Principally one year, can range 3 to 5 years | Moody's Corporation 2025 Form 10-K, revenue recognition note |
| Payment timing | Invoiced in advance of the coverage period, payable in 30 to 60 days | Same 10-K note |
| Observed renewal escalators | Exactly 4.5%, 5.0% and 8.0% on three separate federal lines | Award record arithmetic, shown below |
| Free trial | Yes for Orbis, excluding the export function | Moody's published Orbis terms |
| Investables.ai, for scale | $49 to $249 per month | Our own published pricing |
Most pages answering this question tell you to contact sales. That is true and useless. The rest of this page shows you the two public records that let you walk into that call already knowing the shape of the number.
Does Moody's Analytics publish pricing?
For one product, yes, and almost nobody has noticed. To sell into UK public-sector buyers through the G-Cloud framework, a vendor has to file a pricing document that becomes a public record. Moody's filed one for Orbis in April 2024, and it is a genuine rate card: seat bands, base prices, and module uplifts expressed as a percentage of the base.
Moody's is not alone in that catalogue, which is worth knowing if you are benchmarking a quote across vendors. S&P Global Market Intelligence has filed the same kind of document for Capital IQ Pro, with banded seat pricing from GBP 45,000 for up to five users to GBP 250,000 for up to a hundred, and add-on pricing stated as a percentage of the desktop base: API plus desktop adds 75%, API delivery alone costs 25%. The two filings together are the only published rate cards in this entire vendor tier, and comparing them is the closest thing available to a like-for-like price benchmark. The detail is in our Capital IQ cost guide. Bloomberg, LSEG, FactSet, Morningstar and Preqin have filed nothing there, checked August 2026.
Two caveats before you use it, both important. The figures are in pounds and are quoted for a UK public-sector framework, so they are not a US list price. And a framework rate card is a ceiling that buyers negotiate against, not what everyone pays. What it does give you, which nothing else in this market does, is the internal shape of Moody's pricing: how steeply the per-user rate falls with volume, and what each module actually costs relative to the base.
That shape turns out to be consistent with what US agencies pay, which is the useful part. Cross-checking two independent public records against each other is a much stronger position than repeating a single unsourced "starts at" figure.
How much does Orbis cost?
Orbis is Moody's global company database, covering more than 500 million companies with firmographic, ownership and risk data pulled from over 200 sources. It is the product most people mean when they search for Moody's Analytics pricing, because it is the one a research team buys directly. The published bands:
| Named users | Base price per year | Average per user |
|---|---|---|
| Up to 1 | £98,000 | £98,000 |
| Up to 2 | £155,000 | £77,500 |
| Up to 3 | £204,000 | £68,000 |
| Up to 4 | £244,000 | £61,000 |
| Up to 5 | £265,000 | £53,000 |
| Up to 10 | £360,000 | £36,000 |
| Up to 15 | £405,000 | £27,000 |
| Up to 20 | £460,000 | £23,000 |
| Up to 30 | £555,000 | £18,500 |
| Up to 40 | £620,000 | £15,500 |
| Up to 50 | £675,000 | £13,500 |
| Up to 100 | £900,000 | £9,000 |
| Up to 500 | £2,250,000 | £4,500 |
| Up to 1,000 | £2,950,000 | £2,950 |
| Up to 2,500 | £3,750,000 | £1,500 |
| Up to 5,000 | £4,250,000 | £850 |
Source: Moody's Orbis pricing document filed on the UK Digital Marketplace, G-Cloud 14, April 2024. Unlimited reports, searches and alerts at every band. Minimum contract period 12 months, with training included.
Read the right-hand column and you can see the commercial logic. A single seat costs more than eleven times what a seat costs in a 100-user deal. Orbis is priced to make small purchases unattractive and enterprise deployments the obvious buy, which is why a two-person team asking for a quote is often quietly steered toward a different product.
There is one place the curve misbehaves, and Moody's does not flag it. Going from the 10 user band to the 15 user band costs £45,000 for five seats, £9,000 each. Going from 15 to 20 costs £55,000 for five seats, £11,000 each. So the marginal seat gets 22% more expensive on the way up, in the one range where mid-sized teams actually sit. If you are at 14 users and about to round up to 20 for comfort, that decision costs £55,000 a year and the last few seats are the most expensive ones on the card. Count real named users before the renewal call rather than after it.
Does the US price match? Close enough to be useful. In September 2025 the Department of Energy bought four Orbis Bundle licenses with additional modules for $293,000 over twelve months, about $73,250 per license. The published band for up to four named users is £244,000 base before modules, which lands in the same neighborhood at any plausible exchange rate. Treasury awards for Orbis seats over the same period sit at $513,724 and $630,122 for twelve months each, consistent with the 15 to 30 user bands. Two entirely separate public records, one British and one American, describing the same pricing structure.
How much do Orbis modules cost?
The base gets you the company database. Everything that makes Orbis a risk tool is a module, and each is priced as a percentage of your base price rather than a flat fee, which means module costs scale with your seat count.
| Module | Uplift on base price |
|---|---|
| Risk Flags (Grid) | 20% to 40% |
| Beneficial ownership including T-Rank | 15% |
| Financial strength | 15% |
| Financial risk review | 15% |
| Moody's probability of default | 15% |
| Cyber risk rating | 15% |
| Patent module | 15% |
| Trademark module | 15% |
| API access | 20% |
| ESG score predictor | 10% |
| News and M&A news | 5% |
| Research reports | 5% |
| DEI score | 5% |
| Customized data feeds, Shell Company Indicator, Sanctions 360 | Price on application |
This is the single most actionable table on this page, and it is worth doing the arithmetic before your renewal. A five-user Orbis deal with risk flags, beneficial ownership, probability of default and the API attached is not £265,000. At the mid-point of the Grid range it is closer to £265,000 plus 80%, which is roughly £477,000. Modules are where these contracts actually inflate, and because they are priced proportionally, adding seats silently raises your module bill too.
If your requirement is really the compliance workflow rather than the underlying data, that ordering matters. Screening obligations are frequently the reason a firm ends up paying for Risk Flags across every seat, when tracking those obligations and mapping them to controls is a far smaller purchase than licensing a global risk database to do it.
How does Orbis module pricing compare with S&P's?
Moody's and S&P are the only two vendors in this tier that have ever filed a real price list, so they are the only pair that can be compared on published numbers rather than estimates. On add-ons they go in opposite directions, and the API line is where the difference is starkest.
| Add-on | Moody's Orbis | S&P Capital IQ Pro |
|---|---|---|
| API access | 20% of base price | 75% of desktop base price |
| API delivery only, no seats | Not separately filed | 25% of desktop base price |
| ESG data | ESG score predictor, 10% of base | GBP 3,000 flat for up to 10 users as an add-on |
| Module list published? | Yes, thirteen modules with stated percentages | No module list, three add-ons only |
S&P charges nearly four times the percentage Moody's does for programmatic access. In absolute pounds the picture is less one-sided, because the S&P base is so much lower: on a twenty seat contract, API costs GBP 92,000 on Orbis against GBP 64,500 on Capital IQ Pro. Percentages alone will mislead you here. Multiply them out against each vendor's base before concluding which one is punishing you.
Moody's is the more transparent of the two on modules, publishing all thirteen with stated uplifts, which lets you model a configuration before you ever speak to sales. S&P files more rate cards in total, thirteen separate services, but discloses far less about what attaches to each one. Both filed cards are compared band by band in Capital IQ Pro vs Orbis pricing, and the full S&P catalog with every filed price is on our S&P Global Market Intelligence pricing page.
What do US organizations actually pay for Moody's Analytics?
Federal contract awards are public, and they are the only large set of real, audited US dollar figures for this vendor. We reviewed 93 awards to Moody's Analytics entities. A representative slice, annualized across each period of performance:
| Buyer | What was bought | Approx. per year |
|---|---|---|
| Department of Defense | CreditView Research Select, US public finance and corporate investment grade | $17,048 |
| Social Security Administration | Economy.com bundle, six named users (Dismal Scientist, Precis Macro, databases) | $53,852 |
| Department of Energy | CreditView Corporate Americas, six licenses | About $82,300 |
| Treasury | REIS commercial real estate data | $96,594 |
| Department of Energy | Four Orbis Bundle licenses plus additional modules | $293,000 |
| Treasury | CreditEdge Plus, all five submodels | $272,042 |
| Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation | CreditView monitoring service licenses | About $259,800 |
| Treasury | Orbis licenses | $630,122 |
| Export-Import Bank | Electronic information retrieval platform | About $872,400 |
| Department of Defense | Orbis software licenses, enterprise | About $4,037,000 |
| Department of Agriculture | Farm Production and Conservation credit platform | About $4,852,500 |
Source: USAspending.gov award records, retrieved August 2026, annualized by dividing obligated amounts across the stated period of performance. These are institutional licenses rather than list prices, and federal buyers negotiate under their own rules, so treat them as evidence of scale rather than as a rate card.
The distribution is the lesson. There is no single Moody's Analytics price because there is no single Moody's Analytics. A six-user economics research subscription costs less than a mid-size company's payroll software. A credit platform embedded in a lending workflow costs more than most firms spend on all their data vendors combined.
Does Moody's Analytics raise prices at renewal?
Yes, and the public record shows exactly how much. This is the finding that took the longest to reach and it is not published anywhere else we could find. When the same agency renews the same Moody's line for consecutive twelve-month periods, the increase is not approximate. It is an exact contractual escalator.
| Line | Prior 12 months | Next 12 months | Increase |
|---|---|---|---|
| Treasury, Orbis licenses | $583,446 | $630,122 | Exactly 8.00% |
| Treasury, CreditEdge Plus | $259,088 | $272,042 | Exactly 5.00% |
| Treasury, CreditEdge (following year) | $272,042 | $285,644 | Exactly 5.00% |
| Treasury, REIS commercial real estate data | $92,434 | $96,594 | Exactly 4.50% |
Three different products, three different escalators, each reproducing to the dollar. CreditEdge escalated 5.00% two years running, compounding from $259,088 to $285,644 in 24 months. Nobody renegotiated those numbers. They were baked into the contract at signing.
Moody's own filings corroborate the direction. The 2025 Form 10-K lists "cross-selling, upselling and pricing" as a named strategic growth driver, and reports Moody's Analytics annualized recurring revenue up 8% against organic constant-currency revenue growth of 7%, a gap that price increases help explain. Total Moody's Analytics revenue reached $3,599 million in 2025, up 9%.
The practical consequence: the escalator is a negotiable term and most buyers do not negotiate it. Over a five-year relationship, the difference between an 8% annual uplift and a 3% cap is roughly 25% of your total spend. That is a larger prize than the discount you will win arguing about the first-year price, and it is far easier to ask for.
What European public bodies pay, and the 30% renewal the US contracts do not show
The escalators above all come from US federal renewals, where the increase is written into a running contract. Europe re-lets the same subscriptions in the open, one award notice at a time, and that produces a different and more uncomfortable number. The Spanish tax agency bought the same Moody's product twice, a year apart, on two separate twelve month awards.
| Award | Buyer | Scope, as filed | Term | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| August 2025 | Agencia Estatal de Administración Tributaria (Spanish tax agency) | Database of economic and financial company information | 12 months | EUR 755,120 (about $876,000) |
| August 2026 | Same buyer, same filed scope | Database of economic and financial company information | 12 months | EUR 981,656 (about $1,138,700) |
EUR 755,120 to EUR 981,656 is an increase of exactly 30.0% in one year, on the same product, at the same buyer, on an identically worded twelve month award. Source: Tenders Electronic Daily award notices 544922-2025 and 569936-2026, retrieved September 2026.
Set that beside the US table above and the gap is the whole point. Where the contract runs on and escalates, Moody's takes 4.50% to 8.00%. Where it lapses and gets re-let, the number moved by 30%. Neither notice states a user count or a module list, so part of that could be a wider deployment rather than a pure price rise, and it would be wrong to present it as proven price inflation. But the buyer is identical, the filed description is identical and the term is identical, which is as close to like for like as public procurement gets.
The practical reading is the opposite of what most buyers assume. An escalator clause is usually treated as the thing you want out of the contract. On this evidence a capped escalator is protection: 8.00% written down is a better outcome than an uncapped re-quote, and the reason to negotiate the cap is not that 8% is high but that the alternative can be several times worse.
Where else Moody's Analytics shows up in the European record
The Spanish awards are not isolated. Moody's Analytics entities, including Bureau van Dijk, appear across EU and UK public procurement at every scale, which gives a second independent read on the distribution described earlier.
| Buyer | What was bought | Awarded | Term | Approx. per year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| European Commission, DG Budget, with Latvian and German bodies | Data supply services, credit ratings | EUR 6,000,000 | 48 months | About EUR 1,500,000 (about $1,740,000) |
| Finnish Tax Administration | International company information system | EUR 4,574,620 | Not stated | Term not stated |
| Innovation Norway | Business information services | NOK 5,000,000 (about $535,000) | Not stated | Term not stated |
| European Defence Agency (Bureau van Dijk) | Industry data, market and economic research | EUR 1,000,000 | 48 months | About EUR 250,000 (about $290,000) |
| ISEG, University of Lisbon | Database acquisition | EUR 295,984 | Not stated | Term not stated |
| UK Department for International Trade | GSCIP data sets from Moody's SSA | GBP 120,000 (about $152,400) | Mar 2024 to Sep 2024 | Six month purchase |
| Irish Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment | Market intelligence services | EUR 200,000 | Not stated | Term not stated |
| Malta Financial Services Authority | IT and information services | EUR 169,000 | Not stated | Term not stated |
| European Chemicals Agency | Business information services | EUR 142,000 | 24 months | About EUR 71,000 (about $82,400) |
| Latvian Investment and Development Agency | Access to an international company database | EUR 99,448 | Not stated | Term not stated |
Sources: Tenders Electronic Daily and UK Contracts Finder, retrieved September 2026. Euro figures are converted at $1.16, Norwegian kroner at $0.107 and pounds at $1.27. Several notices publish a total award value without a duration, so those rows are left unannualized rather than guessed at.
The two ends of that table are the ones to look at. The European Chemicals Agency runs a business information subscription for about EUR 71,000 a year, roughly $82,400, which is the shape of a small research team buying company data and nothing more. The European Commission's credit ratings data supply runs about EUR 1,500,000 a year across a four year framework. Same vendor, roughly twenty times the money, because one is a database subscription and the other is ratings feeding a public institution's own processes.
That is the same finding the US awards produce, reached through a completely separate procurement system, which is the strongest reason to trust it. There is no Moody's Analytics price. There is a price for the specific thing you are buying, and the single largest determinant of your quote is which of these two shapes your use case is. Work out which one you are before you take a call, because the answer changes the number by a factor of twenty. If your need is closer to the first shape, reading public companies and their filings, see how Orbis compares with S&P Capital IQ Pro on price and the wider financial data providers comparison.
What Moody's charges when nobody is bidding against it
EU buyers publish the value they expected to pay next to the value they paid, and two Moody's awards in that register carry both figures against a single lot. They point in the same direction as the escalator evidence above, and they pin down the one thing that actually moves a Moody's price.
| Buyer | Buyer's estimate | Awarded | Gap | Procedure |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Malta Financial Services Authority | EUR 169,000 | EUR 169,000.00 | Exact to the cent | Negotiated, sole source |
| Finland, Verohallinto (tax administration) | EUR 4,574,620 | EUR 4,574,620 | Exact to the cent | Open competition |
Source: award notices on Tenders Electronic Daily, Publications Office of the European Union, retrieved September 2026.
The Maltese award is the ordinary case and it is the one to plan around. A financial regulator went to Moody's directly, and the contract closed on the buyer's own published estimate without moving a cent. When there is no competing bid, the estimate in the file is the vendor's quote, and the quote is what gets signed. We found the same result on every sole-sourced award across S&P Global, LSEG and Bloomberg too, which is set out in full on our Capital IQ cost guide.
The Finnish award is the honest counterexample, and it is worth reporting rather than hiding. That buyer ran an open competition on a EUR 4.57 million contract and still signed at exactly the estimate. Competition creates the conditions for a discount, it does not manufacture one, and on a product where few vendors can bid at all the competitive pressure may simply not exist. Across the wider dataset the largest discount we can document, 32.5% off a buyer's budget, did come from an open procedure, but two of the four competed awards we can measure landed exactly on the estimate and one landed 18.3% above it.
Put this next to the 30% re-let the Spanish tax agency absorbed and the practical conclusion is uncomfortable but clear. On this product, the moment of leverage is before signature, not at renewal. A sole-sourced Moody's contract has historically closed at the asking price, and an uncapped re-let a year later ran 30% higher. Getting a capped escalator written into the first contract is worth more than any discount you are likely to negotiate off the opening number, because the opening number is, on this evidence, also the closing number.
How long is a Moody's Analytics contract?
One year is the default, but the paper allows much longer. Moody's Corporation states it plainly in the revenue recognition note of its 2025 Form 10-K: subscription and post-contract support agreements are "generally invoiced in advance of the contractual coverage period, which is principally one year, but can range from 3 to 5 years," with payment due within 30 to 60 days.
Two things follow. You pay the full annual fee up front, before you have used any of it, so the working-capital cost is real for a smaller firm. And a three to five year term is a standard option Moody's will trade against, which is exactly the lever to pull when you want an escalator cap.
The lock-in is visible in the financials. As of December 31, 2025 Moody's reported approximately $4.8 billion of remaining performance obligations in the Analytics segment, of which only about 55% is expected to convert to revenue within a year and roughly 25% in the one to two year window. A quarter of the contracted book stretches beyond two years.
When is the best time to negotiate with Moody's Analytics?
Autumn, well before your renewal date. The 2025 Form 10-K contains a throwaway operational detail with real negotiating value: "a large portion of these services are invoiced in the months of November, December and January."
That tells you Moody's renewal season is concentrated in a ten-week window around the turn of the calendar year, which is when its sales organization is carrying the heaviest quota load and has the least time per account. Open your renewal conversation in September or early October, when a rep can still shape a deal, rather than in the second week of December when your contract auto-renews and you have no leverage left. If your own renewal falls in that November to January band, put the diary reminder at sixty days out and treat the date as a deadline rather than a formality.
Is there a free trial of Moody's Analytics?
For Orbis, yes. Moody's published terms state that full-access free trials are available, with the export function switched off. That exclusion is deliberate and worth planning around: you can evaluate coverage, search and screening properly, but you cannot pull the data out, so design your trial to test whether the companies you care about are actually in there and correctly linked rather than to extract a dataset.
For the credit platforms, CreditLens, RiskCalc and the banking Decision Solutions products, there is no self-serve trial. Those run through a scoped proof of concept with a solutions engineer, and the evaluation is a project rather than a login.
What is Moody's Analytics, and how is it different from Moody's ratings?
They are separate segments of the same public company. Moody's Investors Service assigns the credit ratings. Moody's Analytics sells data, models and software to organizations that use credit risk in their own work, and it reports its own revenue. In 2025 it recorded $3,599 million across three lines of business:
| Line of business | 2025 revenue | Growth | What it sells |
|---|---|---|---|
| Decision Solutions | $1,692m | 12% | Banking, insurance and KYC workflow platforms including CreditLens |
| Research and Insights | $995m | 7% | CreditView, economic research, Economy.com |
| Data and Information | $912m | 7% | Orbis and company data feeds and applications |
Source: Moody's Corporation 2025 Form 10-K. Knowing which line your quote sits in is genuinely useful, because the three are sold by different teams with different discount authority, and a bundle spanning all three is negotiated as three deals wearing one cover sheet.
Why is Moody's Analytics so expensive?
Three reasons, and only one of them is data collection. Orbis standardizes filings from more than 200 national registries into comparable financials, which is genuinely expensive and genuinely hard to replicate. Second, the credit models carry regulatory weight: a bank using RiskCalc or CreditLens in its lending process is buying model documentation and validation support that will survive an examination, and that assurance is a large part of the fee. Third, and least discussed, is that the products embed themselves in workflows. Once a lending process runs through CreditLens, replacing it is a systems project rather than a procurement decision, and pricing reflects that.
The 97% of Moody's Analytics revenue that is recognized over time rather than at a point in sale tells you the business is built on renewals, not on wins. Understanding that changes how you negotiate: you are a recurring line in a forecast, and that is worth something to them.
Moody's Analytics vs S&P, FactSet and Bloomberg on price
| Platform | What it is for | Reported cost |
|---|---|---|
| Moody's Analytics (Orbis) | Global private and public company data, ownership, risk screening | Published rate card from £98,000 for one user, £36,000 each at ten |
| Moody's Analytics (CreditView) | Credit research, ratings context, default data | US federal awards $17,000 to $260,000 per year by scope |
| S&P Capital IQ Pro | Public and private financials, screening, transaction comps | Quote only, reported list near $33,375 per user per year |
| FactSet | Global data, portfolio analytics, attribution | Quote only, reported $4,000 to $30,000 per user per year |
| Bloomberg Terminal | Real-time cross-asset data, chat, news | $31,980 per seat per year single, $28,320 at two or more |
| PitchBook | Private market deal terms, valuations, fund data | Quote only, reported $12,000 to $20,000 per single seat |
| Investables.ai | Structured AI research card per ticker for public equities | $49 to $249 per month |
These are not substitutes for one another, which is the point most comparison tables miss. Nobody replaces Bloomberg with Orbis. The genuine overlap is narrow: Orbis competes with S&P Capital IQ on private company financials, and CreditView competes with the credit research inside Capital IQ and FactSet. Where a firm is paying for two of these, the duplication is usually in company financials rather than in credit models.
How do you negotiate a Moody's Analytics contract down?
Four levers, in descending order of how much money they move.
Start with the escalator, because the award record above proves it exists and shows it running as high as 8%. Ask for it in writing, ask for a cap, and offer term length in exchange. A five-year commitment at a 3% cap beats a one-year deal at 8% before you have argued about anything else.
Second, audit the modules. On Orbis they are priced as a percentage of base, so an unused module costs more every time you add a seat. Pull the usage report, find the entitlements nobody opened last quarter, and drop them. This is the cleanest saving available because removing an unused module costs no user their access.
Third, right-size named users against actual logins rather than headcount. The per-user rate falls sharply across bands, which cuts both ways: sitting just above a band boundary is expensive, and trimming two seats can drop you into a cheaper band entirely.
Fourth, buy on their calendar, not yours. Start in September if you can, and never let a November to January renewal reach its auto-renew date with the conversation unopened.
What are the cheaper alternatives to Moody's Analytics?
It depends entirely on which of the three businesses you were buying from, and there is no single replacement for all of it.
For private company financials and ownership, the realistic competitors are S&P Capital IQ, and for private-markets deal data specifically, PitchBook or Preqin. None of these is cheap, and the choice is usually about coverage in your jurisdictions rather than price. For economic research and forecasting, the Economy.com subscription is the small end of the Moody's range and has genuine substitutes in bank research and public statistical agencies. For credit models used in a regulated lending process, honestly, there is not much of an alternative, and that is exactly why it costs what it costs.
For public equity research, the job most people are actually trying to do when they land on a page like this, the tooling is dramatically cheaper. Investables.ai turns a ticker into a structured research card: what the business does, the key market figures, an explicit bull case, an explicit bear case, comparables and labeled risk flags, from $49 a month. It carries no private company database, no credit models and no real-time market data, and it is informational research rather than investment advice. If your requirement is understanding a listed company rather than screening 500 million private ones, that is the honest comparison.
The short version
Moody's Analytics has one published price list and it is for Orbis: £98,000 a year for a single named user, falling to about £36,000 each at ten users and £9,000 each at a hundred, filed by Moody's on the UK Digital Marketplace in April 2024. Modules add 5% to 40% of base each, which is where these contracts quietly double. In the US, federal awards put real subscriptions between about $17,000 and $4.85 million a year, with most professional deployments landing between $50,000 and $300,000. Contracts are invoiced a year in advance, run one to five years, and carry fixed annual escalators that showed up at exactly 4.5%, 5.0% and 8.0% in the public record. Negotiate the escalator and the module list before you negotiate the headline price, and open the conversation in September rather than December.
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